Hasta La Ideas

The advertising for the new Xbox Halo: Reach game is hotting up with a big integrated campaign launched this week by AgencyTwoFifteen and AKQA. The campaign includes new short films, as well as, excitingly, a giant robot arm that Halo fans can play with via the internet…

The campaign is created by the same team that were behind the hugely successful Halo: Believe work, which won countless awards and set a new benchmark for integrated advertising. The Believe work moved away from the usual context for gaming advertising, and instead of featuring game footage, the ads were shot in a huge diorama built especially for the campaign, which depicted an epic historical battle. It proved to be a huge success, leading to Halo 3 becoming the fastest pre-selling game in history.

All of this makes the new Halo campaign something to watch out for. Will the team be able to top what they achieved before? The new game will be released in mid-September and serves as a prequel to the first three Halo games. Advertising for it first appeared in May, with a film, Birth of a Spartan, showing a young man being transformed into a Spartan III super soldier. The new website for the game, rememberreach.com, now features more films that take us further into the world of Halo: Reach. A trailer for the films is shown above, but visit the site to watch them in full.

More intriguing though, and perhaps the diorama equivalent for this campaign, is a real life giant robot arm which visitors can interact with via the site. By logging in via Facebook, Halo fans can contribute to a virtual monument being created by the robot in tribute to the Noble team of warriors, who defended planet Reach. As in the Halo: Believe campaign, the idea here is one of remembrance toward war heroes, a concept of course familiar from the real world, rather than just a gaming notion.

The robot arm is being used to place points of light contributed by users onto the website, which will slowly build up to form a sculpture made of light. The image will be complete by the time the game launches on September 14. This video on YouTube from Wired shows how the technology behind the robot arm works (and is in many ways more revealing than the website itself). As well as the light sculpture, the website also gives info about some of the characters in the game (see detail below).

If the Halo: Believe campaign is anything to go by, this is probably just the beginning of what Xbox has in store for us in terms of Halo: Reach marketing, so interested fans should keep an eye on rememberreach.com for more developments.