The archive · Marketing & Growth · Marketing decision · 2022
Clash of Clans fakes a 40-year history to celebrate its real 10th anniversary
Supercell invented four decades of Clash lore — mockumentary, playable retro games, real merch — for a 10th birthday.
Supercell (Clash of Clans) · Wieden+Kennedy Portland
What it had to solve
On its tenth anniversary in 2022, Clash of Clans wanted to stand beside the games that defined culture — Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man. Supercell and Wieden+Kennedy reasoned that no conventional birthday campaign could claim that status, so they built an alternate universe where Clash had existed since 1982 and celebrated a fictitious 40th anniversary instead.
How it works
When Clash of Clans turned ten in 2022, Supercell's ambition was a status claim: the game belonged beside Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong and Pac-Man as a franchise that shaped culture. Wieden+Kennedy Portland's answer was to skip the real milestone and celebrate a fake one — an alternate universe where Clash had existed since 1982.
The ruse was built to survive inspection. A 20-minute mockumentary told forty invented years through three fictional founders, shot on five era-specific cameras. Three games from that fake history were actually built — an 80s arcade platformer, a 90s racer and a deliberately disastrous 2000s open-world RPG — and released inside the Clash app. Fake product commercials, a Reddit AMA by a fake founder, an IMDb page, and real tie-ins with Champion, Topps and General Mills made every avenue of fact-checking return more fiction.
Players went along with the joke. The documentary hit #1 Video Trending on YouTube at launch, and the One Show entry records the campaign as drawing the highest fan sentiment in the brand's history. At Cannes Lions 2023 the work took Grands Prix in Entertainment and in Entertainment for Gaming, with the agency claiming the highest brand lift among fans for so low a media spend.
Why it lands
- Faking a 40-year heritage was bolder than any real birthday celebration could be, so it earned attention instead of asking for it.
- Every layer of the world — documentary, games, ads, merch, IMDb, an AMA — rewarded fans who dug deeper.
- Making the retro games actually playable turned passive viewers into participants inside the fiction.
- The humor was self-aware, so the audience enjoyed being fooled rather than feeling deceived.
What it did
The documentary was the #1 Video Trending on YouTube when it launched, and the campaign drew the highest fan sentiment in the brand's history, per the One Show entry. Supercell credited it with the highest brand lift among fans for its level of media spending, and it won two Grands Prix at Cannes Lions 2023.
What you can take
For an anniversary to reposition a brand, don't just mark time — build a fictional past so complete that the audience willingly lives in it for a while.
Since then
The invented history paid off in awards and in how the brand could talk about itself afterward. At Cannes Lions 2023, Clash from the Past won the Grands Prix in Entertainment and in Entertainment for Gaming, and at The One Show 2023 it took the Best of Discipline Pencil in Gaming. Beyond trophies, the campaign showed Supercell a durable format: giving the game a fictional back catalog created content that fans replayed and shared for months, and it became a reference case for anniversary storytelling that refuses to be earnest.
Sources
- Supercell / Clash of Clans | Clash from the Past — The One Show entry
- Wieden Fakes Out Pack To Win Entertainment Grands Prix
- Clash from the Past | D&AD Annual 2023
- Clash of Clans Celebrates 10th Anniversary With Mockumentary and Minigames
- The Monkeys scores The One Show 2023 Best of Discipline in Creative Effectiveness for The Government of Tuvalu 'The First Digital Nation'
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