SEGA / 2K SPORTS
Sega was launching a new football game with an untested feature called First Person Football that provided a truly visceral experience, by allowing players to assume the perspective of their gridiron avatar. This begged the question: could this game cause the teenage brain to lose the ability to distinguish reality from virtual reality?
We explored this postulate in a four-month piece of live, interactive theater based around a beta tester for Sega's ESPN NFL Football. Our narrative unfolded in real-time, beginning online with multiple videos, our site, intensive chat and blog participation, and ultimately moving into the real world with print and television advertising, live events, plus mobile messaging, direct and e-mail; a true, and wildly successful, 360 effort.
This is an excerpt of the article Down “The Rabbit Hole” by Danielle Sacks published in Fast Company Magazine, November 2006 issue. It detailed how this campaign pioneered the use of viral content to entice online sleuths into becoming unpaid narrators of shocking brand fiction.
He woke up in a pool of sweat, with bruises on his arms, and his ankle badly swollen. He’d had another terrifying blackout.
He’d begun experiencing these inexplicable losses of consciousness ever since he began beta-testing Sega’s soon-to-be-released ESPN NFL Football 2K4 video game.
Now his neighbor was banging on his front door: “My wife’s been crying all night! Why don’t you try a move like that with me, tough guy?” One more innocent victim. No doubt he’d attacked her, too, like an animal going in for the kill. Beta-7, as the twentysomething man came to be known, could find no explanation for his horrifying behavior, unless the Sega game was somehow torquing his brain. And so he began his desperate attempt to prevent the game’s release and expose the company’s conspiracy and lies.