OVERKILL’s The Walking Dead
STARBREEZE STUDIOS | OVERKILL SOFTWARE
To launch a small studio’s biggest game, in a crowded space where the competition can’t imagine more than mere survival, we needed to show gamers that OVERKILL’s The Walking Dead lets them thrive through the apocalypse by embracing the chaos.
I’ll start with the end of the campaign…
To celebrate the launch of OVERKILL’s The Walking Dead, we took over Twitch with an epic, four-hour, live variety show featuring celebrity guests, giveaways, gameplay, and stunts, all in a post-apocalyptic bunker.
STREAMING DEAD LIVE received 1.73 million unique views and a total of 124,336 hours of our content was consumed.
We took a no bullshit approach to messaging: OTWD is for hardcore gamers that want to do more than run and gun. So we gave it a tagline that conveyed the 3 aspects of gameplay: strategy, combat, and the metagame.
THINK before you FIGHT so you can LIVE.
The aesthetic needed to reflect the unforgiving direness of this new world. We disrupted viewers feeds by ignoring grids and embracing imperfections. We created art as though we were in the apocalypse by taking textures, patterns, and headlines from the world around us.
Hardcore PC gamers want to be entertained, but they’re not interested in emotional benefits, they just want the facts. We educated audiences by clearly communicating every aspect of the game in unexpected ways, and always with gameplay.
At E3, gamescom, New York Comic Con, and Walker Stalker Con, we amplified every major event across social by capturing and sharing tense “shit hit the fan” moments, stats that matter, and genuine reactions from fans.
Throughout the campaign, we created several pieces of content to humor no one but ourselves. Most were never shown to the client, but in the spirit of the holidays the following were presented, and to our surprise, approved.
My roles
Concepts, creative direction, art direction, design, copywriting & motion.
THE TEAM
Justin Feinstein, Emma Smith, Aaron Kim, Erica Kalicak, Barry Chiang, Lisa Hung, Michael Gillooly & Dan Neumann