RIO DE JANEIRO — It’s unlikely to be added to the long list of official products anytime soon, but a new cellphone game called Run Gringo Run may be closer to Olympic reality than any sponsor’s glossy TV commercial.

Dreamed up by a group of Brazilian computer geeks looking for light relief from a corporate IT project, Run Gringo Run is a free application for Android phones whose central character is a foreign tourist fleeing a group of youths attempting to rob him. The fleeing foreigner can employ a number of tricks to escape them.

Gringo is a catchall word for foreigners used across Latin America. And “gringos” in Rio for South America’s first Olympics have been dealing with all the crime cliches the “Wonderful City” has to offer.

On Aug. 7, Portugal’s education minister was robbed at knife point by the picturesque lagoon where rowing races take place. The previous evening two Australian coaches were held up at knife point in upmarket Ipanema. Days earlier gunmen waylaid three Swedes who had stopped to photograph a favela – briefly seizing one of them, before releasing the visitor.

As well as the crime, the gringo in the game personifies many of the cliches Brazilians see in foreign tourists. His gaudy Hawaiian is open over his beer belly, and hair shaved closely around his thick neck.

When the youths arrive to rob him in a massed robbery called an “arrastão,” or dragnet, he runs away and can either paraglide over hurdles, skate away on a longboard or accumulate enough coconuts and distance covered to “buy” a police officer who will get rid of the thieves. Other obstacles he confronts include an exploding manhole and a cycle path that collapses.

Like the robberies, none of this is imaginary. Instead, for Cariocas, as Rio’s crime-hardened residents are known, scenarios like these are a real as the Christ the Redeemer statue or Copacabana Beach. The game’s creators say they’re just having fun while trying to increase Brazil’s stake in the mobile gaming market.

“It shows all the ills of the country in a fun way, not an offensive way,” said Luciano Nóbrega, 37, one of eight computer specialists from the south of Brazil who were working on a big IT project when they dreamed up the idea. It was designed by Ritchie Cantuaria, 33, who lives in Santa Catarina state in southern Brazil.

As Nóbrega observes – not everyone playing the game will realize it is based on real life.