We provided gamers with one potential conclusion to fans questions, by announcing their long-standing hero had died in action. To stoke the flames, we launched an interactive site that gathered all of the social chatter around the fallen Master Chief and turned into a visual representation of Chief’s iconic helmet. Gamers could contribute messages to honor the fallen hero. Right when gamers thought they knew what to expect, we released a completely opposite perspective with a :60 film that showed Master Chief had actually survived but Spartan Locke was being sent to hunt him down for potentially creating the disaster in the first place. We flipped the visualizer from Chief’s helmet to Spartan Locke’s helmet, a symbol that a hero killed in action had become the villain.

The two films were shot location in Kiev, Ukraine and the black volcanic fields of Northern Iceland. We took the story of #HuntTheTruth to the broader public, teasing the death of the franchise’s iconic hero. This message was supported in multiple media touchpoints in the week before the final film revealed an even worse outcome: that the Master Chief wasn’t dead, rather he had turned against the people he’d sworn to protect. This final film featured visual that seamlessly blending the live-action elements we shot in partially-destroyed buildings of the old Soviet Union with computer generated assets to create the Halo Universe planet of Meridian, shown under siege by an ancient war machine set loose by the rogue hero, the Master Chief. And to capture all of the social media chatter around the two films, we created an interactive site called the Visualizer that gathered all of the social chatter.

• After 3 weeks in market, we saw a 9% lift in purchase intent and a 26.5% lift in title anticipation based on Xbox Internal Title Tracking for October, 2015.

• Halo 5 was the biggest launch with $400 million in sales beating all previous Halo launches and was the fastest-selling Xbox one exclusive game to-date.

• In just three days, Halo 5 became the bestselling game for the entire month of October, a monumental feat given that Halo was competing against other titles available on multiple gaming platforms.

• Xbox one sales were 81% higher than the same time last year and overtook Playstation 4 as the bestselling console for the month of October.

The Halo 5 Campaign’s success rested on the interaction of multiple media touchpoints to effectively tell the story of the Master Chief. This includes video, both online and broadcast, an interactive microsite, influencer posts via Twitter, game developer script rewrites, OOH and social engagement from the Halo 5 fan base.

To make Halo 5 the most talked about game of the year, it was critical to identify a compelling hook that grabbed gamers’ attention. Coming out of qualitative research, it became clear gamers were captivated by the cultural trope of the hunter vs. the hunted which was an aspect of Halo 5’s storyline. It provoked conversations because it was an open-ended question, who was the hero and villain? What were their fates? We realized if you want to start a passionate conversation, create questions, not answers. Our campaign was inspired by the question, “How do you give fans the ability to memorialize a fallen hero but then react when he becomes a possible villain?”

Halo 3 launched in the Fall of 2007, grossing $300 million in its first week to become the ‘biggest entertainment launch in history’ (by dollars, at that point in time). Jump to 2015 and 7 Halo titles later, that level of hype was a distant memory. Awareness wasn’t a problem, but relevance was. For most gamers, the franchise’s storylines had become stale and predictable. We needed to reengage old Halo fans while getting a broader gamer audience that had turned to other blockbuster titles like Call of Duty to rethink everything they had come to expect from a Halo game.