Industry
12 articles
CLASH ROYALE | COPYCATS WELCOME | 2026
The experience points people earned in knockoff games just turned into rewards from the real thing. Instead of suing, they welcomed them in.
Battleground Mobile India | The Great In-Game Wedding | 2025
Meet in the game, marry in the game. On BGMI's battleground Pochinki, a couple held a real three-day Indian wedding, complete with Mehendi, Sangeet and Phere. Two hundred million people watched what became "India's Biggest In-Game Wedding."
MERCADO LIVRE | CALL OF DISCOUNTS | 2025
You're watching a game stream, and suddenly Neymar is a chair. More precisely, it's time to find the Neymar disguised as a chair, and however long it takes to find him decides how big the discount on that chair gets. It sounds completely absurd, but the results actually followed through.
WOMEN IN GAMES | GENDER SWAP | 2022
Male heroes swinging their hips, dancing seductively, striking provocative poses. Taking the movements that have long been treated as "normal" for female characters in games and transplanting them directly onto male characters suddenly makes them feel deeply strange.
XBOX | THE BIRTH OF GAMING TOURISM | 2020
Game ads are usually about weapons and heroes. Xbox decided to sell its games as a "tourist destination" instead. You've got to applaud the sheer craziness of that.
EPIC GAMES | ASTRONOMICAL | 2020
April 2020. The world was still stuck at home. Travis Scott grew to giant size and danced his way across Fortnite's island, trampling everything in his path. 12.3 million people watched at the same time, and 27.7 million joined in over five days—the biggest live event in gaming history.
MICROSOFT | The Franchise Model | 2019
There was a site where you could customize your own Xbox controller. People loved designing them, but kept leaving without buying. McCann London found a trick there that boosted sales by 350%.
STOCKHOLM PRIDE | LOS SANTOS PRIDE | 2017
They put a pride parade into the world of GTA5 that absolutely cannot be destroyed. In a city where you're allowed to run over pedestrians and shoot criminals, they made the one thing you can't attack—and thinking about what that means gives you chills.
PlayStation | できないことが、できるって、最高だ。 | 2016
"It's the best feeling, doing what you couldn't do before." This tagline gets turned into a long-form celebration of life itself. I don't think it got much buzz, but I honestly think it's pretty amazing.
MICROSOFT | Halo 3: Believe - John 117 Monument | 2008
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.
PLAYSTATION 2 | Fun, Anyone? | 2004
Not a single second of gameplay footage appears. And yet I've never seen an ad that feels this much like a game. In Brazil, 1,500 people built a human mountain, climbing it over and over, only to be knocked down again and again. At the end, just one line appears: "Fun, Anyone?"
Xbox | Life is Short, Play More (Champagne) | 2002
A baby born in a delivery room bursts straight through the window, flies into the sky, ages before your eyes, and crashes into a grave. 52 seconds. In 2002, this one film shook all of Europe.