SINGAPORE — BBH Singapore has created a retro arcade-style fighting game to launch the Gong Awards, Singapore’s preeminent creative awards show. Built in-house by BBH Innovation Lab, “Metal Combat: The Gong Awards 2024” is a playful invitation to the show’s ultimate battle in creativity. In the game, players can choose from a series of tongue-in-cheek advertising idea archetypes and battle it out for supremacy, in arenas inspired by the award show categories such as Design, Direct, and OOH.
Each playable fighter has a lovingly crafted satirical design, peppered with advertising cliches and in-jokes. The game’s retro-core look was inspired by 90s fighting games, modernized and built from scratch in-house in Unreal Engine. The game also boasts a fully realized custom soundtrack created by Fuse Adventures in Audio.
“Metal Combat: The Gong Awards 2024” is now available to play via a dedicated website since July 17th – the day the 2024 Gong Awards officially opened for entries. The aim is to raise awareness and drive entries by harnessing the element of surprise through humor and a novel gaming experience.
In addition, the agency launched “Metal Combat: The Gong Awards 2024” with a campaign featuring a 3D OOH animation in Ten Square on July 10th. The 30-second teaser features the characters from the game coming to life and will run until the end of July. At the same time, BBH will send a specially designed game-themed mailer to each 2024 Gong Award jury chair, consisting of a hand-made game cartridge containing details of the URL needed to access the game once it goes live.
BBH Singapore has also produced themed posters for Singapore agencies to post in-house to encourage entries.
Sascha Kuntze, Gong Awards 2024 Co-Chairperson and Chief Creative Officer at BBH Singapore said, “Creative award shows are all about the battle of great ideas. We thought it would be fun to make that metaphor playable.”
This is the second year running that BBH Singapore has created the annual Gong Awards campaign – an honor given each year to the previous year’s Agency of the Year winner. For the 2023 Gong Awards, BBH Singapore created a campaign called ‘Practice for Cannes 2023’.
Credits
Chief Creative Officer: Sascha Kuntze
Chief Strategy Officer: Chris Chalk
Managing Director: Sid Tuli
Executive Creative Directors: Janson Choo, Khairul Mondzi
Associate Creative Directors: Nico Tangara, Luke Somasundram
Art Director: Jonathan Chen, Melissa Ho, Wu Sixin
Illustrator: Wu Sixin
Motion Artists: Jonathan Chen, Gerard Koh, Wu Sixin
Senior Copywriter: Ishan Venkat
Creative Assistants: Sean Leong, Arena Abu, Rachel Cheong
Account Manager: Rina Lim
Music Supervision and Audio Design Partner: Fuse Adventures in Audio
Project Manager: Michelle Tan
Website Developer: Lee Adamson
Operation Director: Eddie Jackson
Executive Producer & Head of Production: Wendi Chong
Creative Technologist: Nico Tangara
