I still have to come up with a good title..

Remember Reach, this is the name of the campaign that will market the release of the latest Bungie’s game, Halo Reach.

In the past I read about “I Love Bees“, an award winning viral marketing campaign and Alternate Reality Game that promoted the release of Halo 2.
I was expecting something big, some really cool idea. I am not disappointed.

I found the site of the campaign querying Google for “remember reach”. It was a bit of subconscious: That is the last sentence of one of the trailers previously posted, and I wasn’t expecting to come across anything particularly new.
First result, rememberreach.org. Not the original Halo Reach pages from the developers, pages that I visited days ago. It doesn’t even show up in the first page of result when trying to Google “Halo Reach”.
So yea, curious site. A funny robot arm, 5 Halo characters represented as dotted silhouettes, a couple of trailers.
And then this mysterious ”Add your point of light” button, unusable for those not having a Facebook account (like me! wohoo!).

Ok, it took me some time to realize it, but practically by pressing that button you log into Facebook and then you are given the possibility to add your “point of light” to the main picture.
I guess that initially that picture was blank, with only the five luminous sparks marking the navigation across the different characters biographies.
Click after click, facebook login after facebook login (I guess there must be some viral element in there), the points of light begin to mark a recognizable shape, a distinguishable silhouette, that of a monument to the Noble Team, the main characters of the game.

I love the idea that every user contribution helps creating this collective experience, developed in a way that can be witnessed live.
A simple but monumental idea, that will for sure be talked about by core gamers and not.

The “points of light” in fact are positioned by a robotic arm, which seems to be (for what I read on dedicated forums) displayed via a live feed of an actual robot, that is probably piloted by the coordinates chosen by each user when placing their points.
Quoting a post that I read afterwards, “the monument IS literally being constructed by us, the users“.

I find this campaign really thrilling (i was ecstatic when I found out about the “points of light” collective experience) and I encourage you to visit the site to discover the rest of the goodies, and see them in action..!
Here the link to the site of the Remember Reach campaign.

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• Halo Reach

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