Bringing our camping to life, we partnered with four iconic artists to release the ROTTR Original Art Series; a collection of limited edition high-end art prints that embody the spirit of Lara and the struggles she faces throughout her perilous adventures.

Breaking from the standard videogame marketing mold, we treated the release of ROTTR as a pop-culture theatrical release and partnered with respected artists from various genres outside of the video game space to reach a wider consumer base within the pop-culture world: Comics, Geof Darrow; Film, La Boca; Music, Frank Kozik; and Fine Art, Tara McPherson.

In celebration of our final print release and the ROTTR launch, we created 40 super premium art crates to seed with media and celebrity influencers within the art and pop-culture space.

Leveraging key consumer gaming events, we released one original art print as we lead up to our November launch.

Announcing at Comic Con, Geof Darrow was our first installment. Driving fans to Xbox’s Tomb Raider activation, Geof personalized and signed high-end prints of his art for the first 250 fans.

Reaching our global fan base, we released our second art print by La Boca at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany where fans met La Boca artist Scot Bendall.

As part of our retail activation, we partnered with GameStop and offered a print of Frank Kozik’s Guerrilla Warfare for every ROTTR pre-order (while supplies lasted). Frank also attended the GameStop Managers Show with Xbox where employees received limited edition high-end prints.

Our final print by Tara was released in November in tandem with the game launch. In addition, extremely limited hand-made crates were seeded with media that held the entire series.

Xbox, Crystal Dynamics, and Tomb Raider dared to explore the world of art and gave artists creative liberty to interpret and redefine their iconic character in ways that have never been done before in the gaming industry.

Based on the impression, sentiment and pre-sale benchmarks that were set during the planning process our program exceeded our initial goals by almost double in every category. Pre-sale for ROTTR at GameStop was lifted by double digit percentages over our expectations and incremental media impressions for the art series mounted to over 35MM in non-paid, written media. The art crate garnered an additional 23MM media impressions.

Customer sentiment and engagement was extremely high with 98% favorable comments, 17.2MM social media impressions, 63,000 likes, and over 3,000 comments.

By looking outside our category to Comics/Film/Fine Art/Music we were able to create something innovative that transcended gamers and brought our franchise to the pop-culture forefront.