The archive · Games & Play · Marketing decision · 2023–2024
Brawl Stars turns its 5th anniversary into a 1995 CCTV mystery that drew 89M visits
For Brawl Stars' fifth anniversary, Supercell built a six-week hunt in a 1995 CCTV security room where players watch 54 live cameras to uncover lore.
Supercell
What it had to solve
Brawl Stars' backstory already lives with its fans: communities on Discord, Reddit and YouTube build theories that sometimes become canon. For the game's fifth anniversary, the team wanted to feed that culture instead of handing players a finished story.
How it works
Brawl Stars' backstory already lives with its fans: communities on Discord, Reddit and YouTube build theories that sometimes become canon. For the game's fifth anniversary, the team wanted to feed that culture instead of handing players a finished story.
So it launched a six-week interactive scavenger hunt: a CCTV Security Room simulation of Starr Park as it was in 1995, a virtual park built in Unreal Engine with live footage from 54 cameras and 30,000 park patrons.
Animated story drops, mysterious journal entries and voicemails let players investigate how the park became the game's battleground. The D&AD jury read the mechanism exactly that way: fans who can explore footage from 1995 make their own discoveries and theories, so the community contributes content to a lore that keeps evolving.
The D&AD entry records 89M visits, a significant boost in community engagement and the highest player numbers Brawl Stars had seen in three years.
Why it lands
- It gave fans raw material - surveillance footage, journals and voicemails - instead of an official story, so discovery belonged to the player.
- It designed for the theorizing culture that already existed, making the anniversary about how this community actually builds lore.
- Real-time content in Unreal Engine made the park feel alive across 54 cameras, sustaining attention for six weeks of hunting.
- Community-made discoveries kept the lore evolving after the event, so the anniversary campaign did not end when the scavenger hunt did.
What it did
The CCTV experience attracted 89M visits, significantly boosted community engagement and produced the highest player numbers in three years, according to the D&AD entry. The anniversary became a fan-driven investigation instead of a one-off event.
What you can take
When a community already builds your lore, do not narrate it: hand fans raw material to investigate, and a mystery they can extend outlives a story you simply tell.
Since then
Starr Park CCTV entered the D&AD Awards archive as a fifth-anniversary experience whose creative move was structural: the game's origin story was not announced but hidden inside an explorable CCTV room from 1995. The entry records 89M visits and the highest player numbers in three years, and the jury highlighted how the format lets communities contribute their own content to a continually evolving lore. That makes the case a template for any brand whose audience already builds its own mythology: give the community raw material to investigate and the campaign outlives its calendar.
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