You won’t see Coca-Cola’s iconic creatures anywhere during the upcoming Super Bowl.

The Polar Bowl second-screen experience, which had the animals watching and reacting to the Super Bowl in real-time, was a big hit last year, but Coke’s marketing team decided to go in a different direction this time around.

It wasn’t an easy decision to make. There was a lot of debate, admits Pio Schunker, senior vice president of integrated marketing communications for Coca-Cola North America. After all, those bears racked up 9 million streams as they cheered and waved their scarves through football’s ultimate match, and frankly, it was tempting to try to repeat that success. But Coke decided to bench the bears to “avoid the trap door of doing a sequel,” Schunker says.

“The whole idea of bringing something fresh versus a sequel was very important to us,” stresses Alison Lewis, senior vice president of marketing for Coca-Cola North America, noting that as popular as the Polar Bowl was, “I think the world of digital today is one where people have relatively short attention spans, and you have to consider that.”

Additionally, Coke wanted to allow consumers to play a more active role in its latest Super Bowl effort—watching the Polar Bowl was certainly fun but a passive activity.

So this year, Coke will “gamify” the Super Bowl through an integrated campaign relying on television, social and digital media that will allow consumers to decide the outcome of “Mirage,” an epic, cinematic commercial that finds three teams of characters you’d typically see in the movies–rugged cowboys, glamorous showgirls and bad-ass badlanders–vying to be first to get their hands on some Coca-Cola.