Bethesda has launched a new “Windows to the World” ad campaign, and it’s a staggeringly gigantic ARG for a staggeringly gigantic game, Starfield.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, the company has released 1001 billboards, of unique landscapes from all across Starfield’s in-game universe. Bethesda placed these 1001 billboards across the globe, for people of all kinds to enjoy.
Now the ARG element behind all this is running on the official Starfield discord. The discord members are now being challenged to find all 1001 of all these billboards.
Based on Video Games Chronicle’s reporting, thus far only four billboards have been found, and there were all in England, and even more specifically, in different London Underground stations. To be fair, they had just launched this campaign, and fans may not have been quite given enough time to find them all before that official launch looming next week.
But guess what? These are all spoilers that Bethesda deliberately threw out there. It’s a given that these 1001 billboards will have some spoilers for content that we have yet to see in public previews. Bethesda claims each one of them are unique environments, so, for example, each screenshot could be from a different planet.
To facilitate this search, each of these billboards have been numbered. That means this is a case of having to find all numbers from 1 to 1001. Bethesda did not mention any sort of reward for winning this ARG, but I imagine somebody could be winning some very nice Starfield related memorabilia and swag, since it’s possible everyone will have a copy of the game by the time this is all through.
We don’t know how successful this pretty audacious marketing campaign will be, given even with how popular Discord is, that’s going to limit how many people will willingly participate. We do know this is blatant and obvious proof that Bethesda hasn’t gotten cheap or is faltering on marketing at all.
Even for a release as big as Starfield, it was pretty audacious of Bethesda to produce 1001 unique billboards, and then spend the money to post those billboards all around the world. Everybody who isn’t on the Discord, or might not even be gamers at all, are probably wondering what a Starfield is. And that’s perfect. It shows Microsoft’s ambition to make this game a household name. Who knows? They just might succeed.
Starfield will be releasing on September 6, 2023, on Xbox Series X|S and Windows via Steam. It will also be Day One on Game Pass.
