Case Study: Singularity

Activision's Singularity, due to launch in November 2009, is the first new IP from the publisher in more than 5 years. And in an economy this tough, the stakes have never been higher.

How do you generate awareness, immerse hard-core gamers in a storyline they know nothing about, and build equity in a completely new brand - all on a shoestring production budget and with no paid media? Send gamers deep down the rabbit-hole with an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) involving murder, conspiracy, and highly classified weapons research on a remote Soviet island.

Our team created a complex and engaging storyline involving a beautiful assassin, an evil Russian scientist, and a rich cast of supporting characters introduced over the ARG's 2-month life span. We started by seeding a viral video, which pointed gamers to clues all over the web: a conspiracy blog, a news station website, a Russian government website, 2 Facebook profiles, 2 Flickr pages, Google Maps, multiple Twitter accounts, 4 webisodes, email addresses and 1-800 numbers. We even leveraged New York Comic-Con, posting flyers urging gamers to help unravel decades of Russian lies.

By directly participating in the storyline, gamers actively helped reveal and shape the narrative. For example, when secret Russian documents were "leaked," we relied on the community to translate them. And based on conversations in blogs and forums, we tweaked ARG elements to deepen the mystery.

Gamers responded en masse, diving head-first into the content. The viral video received more than a million views on YouTube and dozens of blogs. Numerous copycat-postings were made, as well as exposés, reactions, and even a montage of our main character's Flickr photos. Hundreds of thousands of gamers visited the conspiracy blog, yielding an Average Time Spent of almost 3 minutes, and hundreds of comments from 1000+ registered users. The ARG was featured in The New York Times and editorial all over the web, generating pages of forum content and even a wiki.

When it came time to fully reveal the game, anticipation among gamers had built to such a fever pitch that our online advertising received click-through rates 7x the industry average. Proof positive that even with tight budgets and challenging market conditions, great ideas can still produce amazing results.