What better thing to get to ask a journalist on the phone than: “fancy getting made into an orc for the day?”.
Which is exactly what we did when we were tasked by SEGA to help promote the new Total War game — Total War: Warhammer — beyond the gaming pages and develop coverage outside of reviews and previews.
The developer Creative Assembly is one of the largest in the UK and is renowned for creating, amongst other things, arguably the greatest real time strategy games around. However for the first time, they were working with battles and armies away from history and delving into the world of fantasy with Games Workshop.
In the game, orcs, undead, the human empire and dwarves all battle for supremacy in a stunningly realised world, forged by war.
Which is where we saw our opportunity. Little known to most, Creative Assembly also has the largest studio owned motion capture facility in Europe. (Think of Andy Serkis walking around covered in strange little balls when playing Gollum)
So we invited some of the top media in the country, from the Press Association, The Daily Star, and the Daily Express, to The Telegraph, Digital Spy and Sky News to come down and get made into an Orc in real time.
And like many great PR ideas, rather than just going through motion capture for battles or fights, we decided to make as many puns as we could.
The result was some outstanding coverage, with our journalists doing things as silly as tw’orc’ing, dancing to New Orc, New Orc and generally being a little bit silly. Every piece referenced the game, the studio and also the fantastic motion capture and animation capabilities of the Creative Assembly team, with an OTS of over 200 million!
The highlight was probably a four minute broadcast segment on Sky Swipe, which was played around the world on Sky News four times, but PA’s video was also picked up everywhere from BT.com and Yahoo, to completely new audiences through sites like SBTV.
All in all, a great day out and some very happy journalists.
