Most sponsor tents at a motorsport event do the same handful of things: a bike on a plinth, some branded banners, maybe a simulator in the corner. For Yamaha's 2025 MotoGP weekend at Sepang, Vertex was asked to do something that hadn't really been tried before in Malaysia — build an entire original world around the brand, not just decorate a tent with its logo.
The result was Revs of the Rising Wind, staged inside a fictional district we built from scratch and nicknamed YAMA★BARA — a portmanteau of Yamaha and Akihabara, Tokyo's famous anime and electronics district. Every signage panel, every character, every piece of music inside that tent was commissioned specifically for this event. It remains, by a wide margin, the most ambitious custom IP project in Vertex's history.
Starting with a world, not a logo
The brief began with a mood board, not a floor plan: metallic liquid textures, Yamaha blue against black, Akihabara's neon-and-daylight contrast. From there, our in-house creative team and commissioned illustrators built an original key visual — Japanese and English signage woven together, Yamaha's own branding re-skinned to look like it belonged on a real Akihabara shopfront rather than bolted onto a trade booth.
At the center of it all was an original mascot character, designed specifically for this activation: silver hair, a form-fitting racing suit rendered in the same metallic-blue palette as the rest of the world, with three separate outfits — a race queen look, a casual urban look and a rugged touring look — so she could appear consistently across signage, merchandise and the booth's own itasha-style bike livery art. She wasn't a one-off illustration; she was built as a recurring character woven through every zone of the tent.
The brief wasn't "put the logo here." It was "build a place people want to spend their whole afternoon in."
Five activations, one coherent world
Rather than scattering unrelated games around the tent, every activation was written into the same fictional world and given its own Japanese-styled name and signage treatment:
- Gale Gate — the entrance itself, built as an LED "wind animation" portal with a cooling system and an anime-style backdrop reading "Rise to the Challenge of the Wind," staffed in racing-meets-anime uniforms.
- A mecha 1v1 battle — two custom game stations styled around Yamaha's own "Master of Torque" engine technology, reimagined as a fictional energy core powering giant robots. Winner stays on, King-of-the-Hill style.
- A sim racing time attack — six customized racing simulator rigs running a bespoke in-game track with Yamaha-liveried cars skinned specifically for the event, playable free-for-all or head-to-head.
- A Taiko rhythm battle — a customized Taiko no Tatsujin-style setup paired with two arcade-grade drums, running on an original theme song written and produced specifically for the activation.
- A stamp rally and gacha machine — visitors collected stamps by trying each activity, then cashed them in at a Yamaha-branded claw machine for a surprise reward, including crossover merchandise tied to Yamaha's own mobile esports partnerships.
An original song, built for one weekend
Most activations borrow music. This one didn't. The Taiko challenge and the tent's hourly light show both ran on an original theme song, written specifically for the campaign and performed in a Japanese-English hybrid style that matched the booth's own visual world — the same track playing every time the lighting rig synced up with the bike display for the hourly show, turning what's usually a static exhibit into a timed moment worth waiting around for.
What visitors actually got
Alongside the games, the tent housed a Yamaha-themed maid café with a custom-designed uniform built specifically for the activation, a dedicated merchandise zone organised by product series, and a live sketch-artist station where visitors could watch their own itasha-style character art being drawn in real time. Six custom Touge-style racing simulators, the Taiko challenge, Mech 1v1 battles, the maid café, a full merchandise area, Yamaha's top commercial bikes and the MotoGP R1 on display, and the brand's regular MotoGP, Moto2 and Moto3 riders' meet-and-greet all ran across the same weekend — not as separate attractions, but as different rooms in the same world.
The whole build — mood boards, original character design, bike livery art, music, signage, floor plan and five working activations — was compressed into roughly six months of production, culminating in one weekend at Sepang that strengthened a long-running relationship between Vertex and Hong Leong Yamaha Motor Sdn Bhd.
Why this approach works
A branded game station gets played once. A branded world gets explored. The difference between the two is whether every element — the signage, the characters, the music, the reward mechanic — was designed to reference the same story, so a visitor who plays the Taiko challenge recognises the mascot from the entrance gate, and the gacha reward they win ties back to the same universe they just spent twenty minutes inside. That's the model Vertex now uses whenever a client wants an activation to be remembered past the weekend it happened.
"Revs of the Rising Wind" isn't a tagline bolted onto a booth — it's the name of a world built specifically so people would want to stay in it.
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