Brawl Stars is an enormously popular game played by millions of people a month around the world. But the origin of its characters, and even the game’s setting, have been the source of much speculation online.

Our assignment was to reveal that the game was set in a theme park; our solution was to create an elaborate and mysterious origin story for the game and let the community figure it out for themselves. The execution was a culmination of seven different productions over six intense months.

We worked with the game’s creators to craft a mysterious “found footage” short film that dropped without warning into a regularly-scheduled game update on YouTube.

We hid a game (within a game within a game) within the Brawl Stars game itself. The Easter egg was well hidden, but that didn’t stop 20 million+ players from discovering it, playing it and posting its secrets online only seconds after it dropped.

Once the YouTube, Reddit and Discord channels for Brawl were fully fired up, we reached out to influencers WAY outside the Brawl universe and let them into the fray. Increasingly bizarre product placements intrigued their audiences, while Brawl players delighted in their confusion.

And that barely scratches the surface. Blinking pixels in the game turned out to be morse code that led to an unlisted radio station on YouTube. Although the transmissions were mostly static, thousands of players stayed tuned for months to hear the coded messages we left in more than a dozen languages.

By creating a complex web of equal parts information and misinformation, this film and its supporting campaign revealed to players the origin of Brawl Stars’ amusement park while simultaneously creating even more mystery and intrigue around its characters and backstory.

In the end, the film hit #1 trending on YouTube in several countries around the globe and #2 in the US, adding nearly a million new channel subscribers and whipping the Brawl community into a frenzy of memes, speculations and theories that are still hotly debated to this day.