After five years of absence, Ubisoft was relaunching Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon. The competition was brutal: Call of Duty, Battlefield. The audience was smart and immune to standard gaming communication. We needed to make people not just want to play Ghost Recon, but want to be the Ghosts themselves.
We brought John McTiernan out of retirement. The director of Die Hard and Predator had not made a commercial in fourteen years. It took months to find him and longer to get him on board. But what we were building wasn’t a commercial, and he understood that. “Red Dot” is ninety seconds of dark, precise comedy: a cat video with a very final result, three bullets, zero wasted motion. It generated over 19 million cumulative views.
“Ruthless,” the companion launch trailer, chose a completely different register: the faces of the Bolivian cartel’s victims, shown with slow, documentary honesty. No action-movie heroics. Their suffering feels real. Their faces stay with you. Together the two films define the Ghosts: intelligence over spectacle, efficiency over noise.
Over 6.8 million people played the Ghost Recon Open Beta, the most successful Beta in the history of Ubisoft.
19 million cumulative views. Over 6.8 million players in the Ghost Recon Open Beta, the most successful in Ubisoft history.
