Bulletstorm

Core gamers are opinionated as hell and incredibly influential.  Getting them on your side early can mean life or death for a new title.

I discovered a passionate conversation amongst the core about how tedious the dominant shooters (Halo, Call of Duty) were becoming. So I poured some gasoline on that fire with an (ethically questionable) strategy that de-positioned the competition and set Bulletstorm up as the solution to “shooter fatigue." The strategy: Bulletstorm makes killing more fun. 

"Look away, Call of Duty fans. Bulletstorm's Duty Calls parody game viciously sums up the Call of Duty experience in one painfully funny experience….”Kotaku.com

Results (Duty Calls)

The showcase of this campaign was a first-of-its-kind, fully interactive, downloadable video game called Duty Calls that lampooned every tired cliché the genre was known for.  To maximize buzz we launched it as if it were a real game with a website, trailer and press release as well as a search and Facebook buy targeting Call of Duty fans. 

  • Duty Calls went gold in its second day with 875,000 downloads and double platinum seven days later with 2 million. Prior to launch it saw 3.2 million downloads.

  • 4.2 million video views. (Strangely, internet celeb PewDiePie posted his play-through of the game last year with almost 5.8 million views alone).

  • Over 150 articles about Bulletstorm and the Duty Calls including all the big video game sites and beyond to mass sites like MTV, USA Today, Forbes and CNET.