2K Games

“What the hell is Citizen Skywatch?”

That’s a question I heard a lot during PAX Prime this year. And now, here’s your answer.

Conventions are often nerve-wracking experiences - particularly in the gaming industry, where code and swag and press opportunities all collide on a massive scale. Marketing campaigns (specifically, more experiential or “viral” ones, to use the latest buzz words) are also fairly harowing due to the fact they live and die on their own merits and generally have so many moving parts that potential points of failure are numerous. Due to these complications, it’s not surprising that most companies don’t launch such campaigns during the biggest consumer gaming convention of the year, but for reasons that might all point to insanity, we decided to try.

Last month, on August 15, a new website called Citizen Skywatch launched, calling upon Citizen Soldiers to sign up and uncover the secrets of an unknown enemy that was invading the United States under the noses of unwitting and innocent citizens – an invasion that the government was covering up and Citizen One, the site’s author, was determined to reveal.

The site, as intrepid internet sleuths soon discerned, is a hub for a new Alternate Reality Game (or ARG) for our upcoming game, XCOM. Citizen Skywatch takes gamers back into 1960 and for approximately the last month has been providing them a bread crumb trail to uncover the mysteries that lead up to XCOM’s beginning in 1962. Citizen One communicates in many ways: Teletype feeds, Recruitment Centers, even Bulletin Boards (communication methods we in 2011 call Twitter, Facebook, and forums) and gamers have stepped up and become Citizen Soldiers and help him in his now-no-longer one-man cause.

For those of you who are fans of 2K Games (and specifically BioShock 2) you might remember another ARG we ran called Something in the Sea, and if you know that campaign, you will remember it did not live only in the alternate universe of the online space but invaded the real world through the postal service, surreptitious rendezvous, and sometimes meetings of epic proportions involving hundreds of gamers spread across several continents. As you can imagine, that could be a difficult act to follow – but we’re up for the challenge, and from the outset of the program, Citizen Skywatch’s mandate was to be intense and over-the-top from day one.  

Less than two weeks after the launch of the www.citizenskywatch.com, Citizen One was calling new recruits to Seattle to follow a lead from one of his accomplices. And from August 26-28 some of the over 70,000 attendees of PAX stumbled upon Citizen One’s makeshift bunker, nestled in booth #3417.

The booth bore no XCOM logos – just a giant Citizen Skywatch sign on the wall. Built to look like a 1960s fallout shelter, no 2K Games employees trolled the booth – gamers were greated by suspicious men in horn rimmed glasses who questioned their loyalty to the country and drilled them on their potential Communist ties before passing them over to a surly nurse who tested their physical and mental fitness (complete with ESP test). Recruits were then sent to the final area where they received their own code name and ID badge, then sent on their way to solve more puzzles outside the booth.

Most people didn’t know what Citizen Skywatch was – but an hour after show open, the booth had over an hour long line that remained (and only grew) throughout the weekend. At the end of the day on Friday evening, over 300 people people who had passed through Citizen Skywatch and received ID cards lined up outside a brewery in Seattle to see the evidence Citizen One had called them all into town to see. Without having a clue what was waiting through those doors (and for some in the crowd, without still knowing concretely what game the campaign was for) they canceled dinner plans and opted out of panels to see what Citizen Skywatch had in store for them.

When doors opened, gamers-turned-Citizens stepped out of 2011 and into 1960 and saw one of the more gruesome and strange crime scenes I’ve helped create in my career at 2K Games (and I’ve actually created a surprising amount). Again, no obvious 2K staff member was in sight that these gamers could easily recognize, and instead they talked to Citizen 39, who explained what little he knew about the strange corpse with glowing blue fragments shooting out of his skull.

By the time I stepped up onto our makeshift stage to show the video we had planned for the evening, I realized that we hadn’t thought to plan for a crowd so large I would need a microphone to speak. Chances are, most people in the crowd didn’t hear me when I thanked them for coming and introduced the sneak peak Developer Diary for XCOM, but when the video flipped on, the entire crowd grew silent, and when it was over, they all broke out cheering and clapping. One girl beside me said “I knew it was XCOM!”

For the next couple hours, gamers ate and drank, attempted to needle more information out of Citizen 39 about that creepy corpse, and met with some of the 2K Marin developers and had them sign exclusive posters we made for the event. And for the rest of the weekend, people continued to visit the booth (some several times to make sure they hadn’t missed any clues) to receive all the pieces of the puzzle we had scattered around and to thank us for the experience.

To say I was nervous about taking on this project is an understatement – I don’t think I got a solid night’s sleep since the campaign launched in August, because while we’ve run an ARG in the past, and even run ARG-oriented booths at PAXs, this one was over twice the footprint of anything we’d done in the past and run completely by improv actors. Whenever I needed to go into the booth, I had to relay messages to the Citizens working there completely in character, and most of the time they scowled at me for breaking in while they were dealing with new recruits.  Moreover, we planned a Friday night party at the same time as several notable parties and panels and resolutely decided to not tell anyone attending why our shebang would be cooler than any other game in town.

But they showed up. Early. In droves. And waited outside, each with a Citizen Skywatch ID card hanging from their PAX lanyard. And when all was laid out before them, they cheered.

It’s an incredible (and terrifying) experience to try and do something that no one has done before, and I cannot say how proud I am to work for a company that asks for campaigns that sound completely crazy and says “awesome, let’s do it.” We wanted to make a booth that spoke for itself – that showed people how immersive our story was going to be, rather than simply telling them. We wanted people to step into our world, quite literally, and become part of the adventure that was XCOM, and to never forget what happened to them. To do that, sometimes you can’t use feature lists or logos. Most people would say that’s folly – to promote a game without mentioning the game at all. But sometimes, making the largest impact is by not telling someone what to see or think at all, but offer up the world make the story on their own. After all, that’s what video games are all about, aren’t they?

To the best of my knowledge, no one but 2K Games has ever run a completely in-fiction booth at an expo, and this time around we did it without any direct branding to our game or even a representative nearby to help confused passersby – in fact, that’s what we wanted – and it worked. We processed over 1,000 new recruits through the booth over that weekend, and from the tweets, blogs, and forum posts I’ve been tracking over the past couple days, they are fully enlisted and dedicated to Citizen One’s cause. The XCOM community has already tackled and solved all of the PAX puzzles we provided for them and are eagerly digging into the new ones that are being uncovered every day. And as I said to those who sought Citizen Zero (that’s me) out during PAX weekend: The games have just begun. It’s only going to get a lot crazier from here.

Sleepless nights, ahoy. Every single one of them will be worth it.