Assassin’s Creed Origins claims to be the most accurate reproduction of ancient Egypt ever made. Moreover, its giant open world—at the scale of the entire country—introduces a new systemic environment where every character and animal has its own agenda and lives a credible life. With its wonders of ancient civilization, Egypt has always been a favourite of tourists. So we thought that if this game is as close to reality as it claims, why not let people visit it as tourists?

We launched ExploreAncientEgypt.com, a website where gamers could book immersive guided tours within the actual game build. There they could explore never-before-seen regions of the game map and bring back digital memories in the form of Instagram and Facebook-like stories that they could customize and share everywhere on their social platforms—just as any excited tourist would.

Instead of producing a typical enhanced trailer, we created three interactive video tours, shooting directly inside the game engine, with no staging, nor post-production, so the game would look exactly as it is. To add to the authenticity of the tourist element, we worked with a historian to write the guide’s speech that gave information about each region as gamers explored them.

At the centre of this tour experience, we implemented the social media trend of 2017: an Instagram story-like feature. Explorers could bring back instant memories, customize them with exclusive stickers, and just like in real life to make the rest of the world envious, they could share them on social media.

These mini-videos, shot and shared from the tours, showcasing exclusive content from this highly anticipated game, became thousands of “honest trailers” flooding on social media feeds.

The visits were opened three weeks before the game was launched. Due to the core concept of limited tour availability, they created a spike in engagement with the audience. On average, visitors spent 14 minutes on the tours, an impressive result when you consider the 6.5-second average for skipping content. Fans shared thousands of “stories”, generating most of the reach through social, earned media. Most importantly, as it was not Ubisoft but actual gamers who shared this exclusive game content, we completed our objective of restoring trust in the franchise.

Together with other brand efforts around the world, this campaign contributed to achieving the best-ever launch of an Assassin’s Creed game. Some 1.5 million units were sold in the first week, which is twice as much as the previous title of the saga.