Hey marketing team behind Call Of Duty: Black Ops III, not cool man.
Yesterday, the Twitter account belonging to the hyper bro-tastic first person shooter game Call of Duty switched their handle to a fictional news page called Current Events Aggregator and broke the news of an explosion on the “North bank of the Singapore Marina”.
Last time we checked, no explosions here — just really hazy skies at most.
The story then developed in tweets, updating their followers that the make-believe explosion took place at a research lab belonging to ‘Coalescence Corporation’, and that Singapore went under a state of emergency. Riots broke out in Chinatown, shots rang out from drones and some dude called James Chung (imaginary commander of Singapore Armed Forces) announced the establishment of a quarantine zone. You can check it out on their Twitter page, they’re still up.
The string of alarming tweets later ended with:
Okay. Just another viral campaign which kinda fell flat. IGN‘s Mitch Dyer called the whole thing irresponsible, stating that the stunt “accomplishes nothing”. Polygon‘s Allegra Frank remarked that even with this “dramatic, poorly packaged stunt”, the upcoming game would still sell millions — despite everyone being totally horrified that the alarming news was just another push for publicity.
For those who don’t get the tweets, Black Ops III is the third game in the popular Call of Duty franchise developed by Treyarch (not to be confused with Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare series or Sledgehammer Games’ Advanced Warfare series). The latest Call Of Duty game is set in a near distant, dystopian future of 2065, featuring lots of high-tech weaponry, augmented limbs, drones and a strong OORAH! theme.
Well at least we know now that Singapore’s gonna play some part in the upcoming game — it’ll be fascinating to see what the game’s Singapore map has in store. COD:BO III is coming out on last-gen and current-gen Xbox and Playstation consoles this Nov 6.
Photos: Call Of Duty Facebook page
