Campaign Information The Background
The Tomb Raider game is in its 9th iteration and is recognised as one of the most successful franchises in gaming history. Despite its huge success, the series has lost momentum in recent years. Despite creating the ‘role play’ console genre in recent years, both the playability and popularity of copycat games has surpassed that of Tomb Raider.
Tomb Raider underworld represents a re-birth of the franchise and its success is vital to Eidos.
The Challenge
The goal was to speak to larger and more diverse audience rather than just the Tomb Raider fanatics who would buy the game regardless.
The Insight
To reintroduce the Tomb Raider brand as a ‘role playing’ puzzle-orientated game rather just focusing on traditional Lara’s ‘assets’.
The campaign works as the first step in actually playing the game. Coming to the site is a real taste of the game itself and gives gamers a insight into the excitement of playing Tomb Raider Underworld, driving them, through a positive experience, to purchase the game itself.
The Strategy
To create a site with a virtual treasure hunt over 21 days using the new Google Earth browser plug-in. 21 artifacts were to be ‘hidden’ across the world with 21 Playstation 3’s to be won along for finding them on a daily basis.
Additionally a major prize of a trip around the world was offered as a supplementary prize for solving a lower engagement puzzle, designed to appeal to low involvement gamers who did not want to play the treasure hunt.
The Execution
We spent a day in studio filming the ‘real’ Lara Croft, Alison Carol. We captured the footage against a digi-green screen and then chroma keyed the images. The aim was to capture as many Lara-esqe movements / scenarios as possible throughout the day. We also added cgi animation from the TRU game which interacts with Lara during some the scenarios. The goal is to create a compelling exciting product that users leave on their desktop.
