Nov. 3, 2008—Even if you're not a "gamer" and don't really care about video games in general, it's hard to ignore Bethesda Softwork's Fallout 3, which hit shelves last week. The company has done an amazing job of mixing media, going for full saturation and awareness both before the launch, and after. And while you might think the campaign centered around electronic media, if you had waged a bet on that, you would be very poor right now.

"[We wanted] to break through and present something that had the feeling of 'this is something big, this isn't just another game'," said Pete Hines, vice president of PR and Marketing at Bethesda. "No one part of the campaign stood on its own, and the idea was that everything we did tied together, so that whether you'd kept up with everything we had been doing, or just found out about the game for the first time, it all made sense."

Getting the Word Out
The campaign itself consists of multiple facets, from printed materials such as posters and giveaways, to an online presence, to appearing at trade shows, and just about everything else you can think of in between. Some of the highlights beyond print consisted of Brotherhood of Steel statues that stand eight-feet tall and were sent to select retail locations just before the launch. The company also created several special editions of the game for fans to purchase, which included a variety of items such as a lunch box, or the arm-band computer the character in the game sports. In addition, retail locations around the globe offered a wide range of pre-order items to entice fans to get into the spirit of the game.

However, at the end of the day, with all of these other pieces and parts to the campaign, print still makes up a huge chunk of the message.

Printing the Apocalypse
The theme of Fallout 3 is a retro post-apocalyptic setting, in which the world never lost the 1950s-era innocence and design aesthetic, but was devastated by nuclear war anyway, forcing residents to retreat into underground vaults. You play an individual who ventures out into the world years later to find your father, exploring a vast and seemingly endless universe of characters, monsters, technology, and settings. It takes place in and around the ruins of Washington, D.C. This explains why the materials for the game all have both a futuristic feel and an old-fashioned one, tying together two very different concepts. The marketing materials had to reflect both of these concepts, which was a tall order. But beyond the creative, Bethesda had to figure out how to communicate some fairly complex ideas about their universe in quick, easy-to-digest sound bites. This is where the print campaign comes in.

The marketing campaign covers a wide variety of printed media, from bus wraps to posters in retail locations, but the biggest, and most viable part of this component is the DC Metro Station Domination campaign. In it, Bethesda took every scrap of ad space the metro had, putting up floor graphics, banners, backlit signage, posters, and more.

"Because there is a ridiculous amount of ad space to fill up, we had to go with a mix to keep things from getting dull and repetitive," said Hines. "So at the entrances to the station you'll see 1950s style posters for different products. Then we have the Brotherhood of Steel on some huge banners in a few key places along with runners for the game, the release date, PrepareForTheFuture.com, and so on. We have some pillars and a couple of floor graphics that feature Vault Boy as well, mostly because he's iconic and different, and we really wanted to get across both the 1950s-era vibe of the game and the post-apocalyptic part.

"And finally, probably the most impactful part are the backlight posters we had done. One features your character walking down a deserted street with his dog. One features a Brotherhood of Steel figure in front of the partially destroyed Capitol from the game, and the other in front of a somewhat beat-up Washington Monument. When you see them, they definitely stop you in your tracks. Obviously being in this area, those images mean a bit more than they would anywhere else, and we wanted to design them so that they had an impact on you, without trying to scare anyone."

Technical Details
The print work for the Station Domination was done by Print International, which has locations in New York City and Freeport, N.Y. The point person there was Mark Weir. CBS owns the media space in the metro, and Weir has worked with them for the past eight years, doing such things as regular signage and other domination campaigns. For the Fallout 3 project, CBS turned to him again to coordinate and handle the print side of things. The self-adhesive vinyl graphics were produced on a 3M substrate, printed on a PressVu 320 eight-color machine. The backlit signage was done on Duratrans material on the Durst Lambda press. Color matching was done to the client-supplied color guide, and they got it in three rounds.

"That's no small job either, changing out every single ad in the station at once, but it looks great and we've gotten a ton of feedback from all sorts of people on it," Hines noted.

Post-Launch Print
Bethesda didn't stop there with its marketing, either. Once the game launched, and during the next few months, the company will run print ads in various national venues, such as USA Today, along with magazines geared specifically toward their audience. In addition, retail locations like Best Buy and Game Stop will feature posters, displays, and other printed materials in their stores to keep the game in the front of game-buyers' minds.

"I don't know if I could give you a percentage [of prelaunch versus launch materials,]" said Hines. "A lot and a lot. We spend a lot of time in the pre-launch phase focusing on awareness, and driving people to go pre-order the game, making sure that when something big is happening on the PR side of things, we're spending the time and money to make sure people see it. At the same time, we have a lot of things that are just getting started at launch, including a massive TV campaign, tons and tons of initiatives at retails, lots more online ads, and so on. You can't afford to skimp on either side of that line."

And what has the reaction been overall to the campaign? According to Hines, it's been very positive. "It's not often you get e-mails from fans or people in the industry saying how much they like the campaign, or some part of it they just came across."

As for ROI, because the game just launched, there are no hard numbers yet on the true test of how well the campaign worked—the number of games sold. But Hines is very optimistic, just by seeing the amount of buzz that's been generated, and the number of pre-orders the company has seen.

There is one thing they can be sure of, however. No matter who you are or your interest in video games in general, it's hard to miss this one on any level. Especially with the well-done, multi-media campaign that demonstrates just how well print, TV, and the Internet can play together to achieve the ultimate end result.