alone in the dark
Resurrecting the original survival horror
THE mission
Alone in the Dark, the godfather of survival horror, returned in 2024 after almost a decade away. It needed an unmissable campaign that highlighted its rich, mysterious atmosphere, tense gameplay, and the star power of David Harbour and Jodie Comer, all without spoiling the game’s suspenseful story penned by horror legend Mikael Hedberg.
THE CAmpaign
We created two clear anchor points to base our beats around - the first, a spotlight event revealing Hollywood talent and giving creators their first hands-on, the second a massive live experience which brought the world of Alone in the Dark crashing into ours.
“Alone in the Dark In Real Life”, as it came to be known, addressed the concern of spoilers while still creating a mass exposure moment. Working with partners at Arena Media UK and Realm Pictures, we sent 40 content creators through a house of horrors packed with easter eggs from the game.
Many of these creators were part of a multi-stage booking, including reacting to the spotlight, opening a custom puzzle box that acted as an invite to the IRL experience, and streaming an hour of gameplay on release day. At every stage, linking back to the game while maintaining a sinister air of mystery was at the forefront of our planning.
With the tentpole moments of our campaign in place, we needed a suite of support assets to help maintain and build interest in the game between beats, and keep content releasing post-launch. Accessing the creative production skills of the team at We Are Reach, we released a host of assets ranging from core feature trailers through to lore explainers, festive statics, and even a podcast series.
THE RESULTS
The IRL event in isolation achieved over 10,000,000 organic views in release week, and remains evergreen on each creator’s channel to this day, with gameplay and puzzle box livestreams driving over 1,700,000 hours watched across the launch period.
On PlayStation and Xbox’s channels alone, our suite of trailers for Alone in the Dark reached in excess of 2,300,000 organic views, with many more across other rehosting partners and on THQ Nordic’s owned channels.
Campaign named Alone in the Dark IRL no. 2 in their list of Top Media Ideas of 2024, stating “The collaborative teams behind these ideas have thought creatively about formats to help their brands stand out in a fragmented landscape.”
As co-lead on the project, this is without doubt my greatest professional achievement to date, and a testament to what can be achieved when passionate, creative teams join forces.
