Let’s shock and create discussion amongst core Halo fans with a provocative premise: franchise hero Master Chief was dead. Halo is a multimedia franchise with novels, comics, and TV shows that flesh out the universe, and fans frequently debate the finer points inside the community. But what we needed was a way to then capture those discussions and rebroadcast them out to more gamers. Thus the visualizer was born: a place where fans could express themselves and non-fans could feel that passion.

The project launched on September 27th alongside a film that revealed that the franchise hero Master Chief was dead. At the end, viewers were shown a wire-framed Master Chief helmet, sparsely populated with memorializing comments from the fan. Comments were pulled in from social platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and users were also able to submit their thoughts directly through the site. As time progressed, the helmet continued to fill out with comments of remembrance. On October 2nd a second film was released, which revealed that Master Chief was still alive and his death was an elaborate cover-up. The experience then changed, with the image of Chief’s helmet replaced by the helmet of Spartan Locke, the soldier sent to hunt down the now traitorous Master Chief. And with that the social discussion turned from memorial to betrayal.

We saw 3X the average time spent on the expanded iRoll paid digital unit, with a 260% lift in engagement. We saw 4.4MM total engagements and 198,000 total page views, with an astounding 50,000+ submitted messages throughout the experience. Most impressively, we saw fans spending an average of two minutes and thirty seconds reading the reactions and posting their own theories about what it all meant.

The greatest measure of our success is how many fans bought the game to see what happened to their hero. Halo 5: Guardians was the biggest launch in Halo franchise history with over $400M in global sales mere days after release.

Halo is one of the most popular video game franchises, and its hero, Master Chief, is the backbone of the franchise and a video game icon.

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. Visualizer 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?”

In 2015, Xbox was launching a new Halo game, a new chapter in their most popular and storied video game franchise. With an October launch date, the goal was bold and simple: drive the fans wild to make Halo 5: Guardians the most talked about game of the year. While the overall campaign objective was to reach all gamers, Xbox specifically needed a digital experience that would engage the most passionate Halo fans and recruit them into the social conversation in a way that would amplify their voices and reverberate beyond the core.