Brothers to the End www.gearsofwar.com/brotherstotheend Brief For the launch of Gears of War 3, our challenge was to excite our core fans while giving fans of other shooters a reason to get involved. Execution We etched images of brotherhood from the Gears of War trilogy into three walls using live explosives. To see them, fans were asked to team-up with the one Facebook friend they knew could count on. Teams of brothers then worked together to detonate each chapter of our story, scrambling to get their hands on exclusive content. Result We united brothers from around the world and turned our core fans into ambassadors of the game. Over a 30 day period, we saw over 1.7 million individual interactions, many from fans of rival shooters. Our campaign not only pushed Gears of War 3 to a record setting 1.3 million pre-orders, but helped it reach over 3 million copies sold in the first week.Gears of War 3 had a central theme: brotherhood. In this blockbuster video game franchise, teamwork is paramount: players have to work together to defeat often overwhelming odds. Our tagline, "Brothers to the End," brought this theme to life, as did our campaign in which gamers were asked to team up with a brother to take part. They did so by using Facebook to choose the one (and only one) friend who wouldn’t let them down. Then together, teams answered calls over a three-week period to unlock a series of detonations. As expected, people who had been playing more recent first-person shooters reached out to the person they played with most. This created a direct user-to-user testimonial and brought new fans to the franchise, resulting in over 1.7 million individual interactions.
