MICROSOFT | Halo 3: Believe - John 117 Monument | 2008
The 1,200-Square-Foot Commitment That Turned a Game Into "War" / Microsoft "Halo 3: Believe"
It's an ad for a video game, but no game footage shows up anywhere in it. All you get is an old soldier recalling memories of war, and a massive 110-square-meter battlefield diorama. This ad treated Halo 3 like it was a real war.
The problem
In 2007, Microsoft was about to launch Halo 3, an Xbox 360 exclusive, and wanted to reach people beyond core gamers. The previous game, Halo 2, had been a hit, but it wasn't yet being called a "culture." The agency T.A.G. San Francisco's answer was to take the conventions of war movies and war memorials and apply them directly to the game.
The insight
Showing game footage wouldn't land with people who'd never played it. So the team worked only with universal themes—duty, sacrifice, heroism—and told the story entirely from outside the game itself. The words of CD Scott Duchon sum up the whole idea: "If you believe something completely, without ever looking away, you can make other people believe it too."
The idea
At the center of it all was a real, physical diorama called the "John-117 Monument"—110 square meters wide and 3.6 meters tall. New Deal Studios and Stan Winston Studio built 800 figures in four weeks, scanning actors' faces to recreate them. Rupert Sanders filmed it slowly, set to Chopin's "Raindrop" Prelude. They also made a documentary-style spot of an old soldier looking back on the past, and online they built a fully explorable site, a fictional photo exhibition, and even stamps—treating the whole thing as if it were a war that had genuinely happened.
What happened
First-day sales reached $170 million, the biggest entertainment launch at the time. It took home the Grand Prix in both Film and Integrated at Cannes Lions 2008 (that same year, the Film prize was shared for the first time ever, with "Gorilla" also winning). It also picked up numerous awards at the ANDYs, Clio, One Show, and ADC.
Afterthought
This is what it looks like to fully commit to believing in something. To treat a video game as a monument, they went and built an actual 110-square-meter diorama—and that leap is exactly what gave it a persuasiveness CGI could never match. Honestly, it makes you want to believe too.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Grand Prix 2008
