The Challenge: For the highly-anticipated launch of PlayStation’s The Last Guardian, fans were clamoring for any new information about the years-in-development game. Knowing the developer was occupied with finishing the game, a series of social content kept fans engaged and informed leading up to launch.
The Solution: First, a series of social posts gave fans a peek “Behind the Screens” at the movie-like development process of the game, by featuring never-before-seen concept art and storyboards.
To reinforce the theme of friendship, an original manga-style digital comic was developed exclusively for release on social channels, inspired by original artwork by Fumito Ueda, the game’s visionary creator.
Illustration by David Sookhochoff
Appealing to our fan’s sense of wonder, a unique Papercraft Illusion allowed fans to craft their own optical illusion model, where the game’s adorable protector Trico appears to turn his head to follow you around the room, just as he does in the game.
To underscore the game’s puzzle-solving mechanics, a gamified Messenger bot experience taught fans how to “Train Trico”. The bot took fans through several themed stages, as they learned more about the mythical beast. Play Training Trico on Messenger.
For completing the Messenger Bot game, players were rewarded with an original Sticker Pack that can be used across popular chat platforms.
The Results: The Behind the Screens social posts generated 6.6M impressions, with 523,000 engagements. The Friends to the Core digital comic yielded an engagement rate 159% higher than typical content, and over 13,000 unique users enjoyed the Training Trico bot experience, sending nearly 500,000 messages and yielding 84,000 CTA clicks.
