The archive · Content & Film · Marketing decision · 2022
Banda MS writes the first corrido glorifying Call of Duty's heroes
Call of Duty asks Mexico's Banda MS for an original corrido, giving video game heroes their first song in the genre Spanish speakers already love.
Activision (Call of Duty) · Banda MS
What it had to solve
More than half a billion people speak Spanish, yet video games had never talked to them. Call of Duty's newest game featured Mexican characters and a stretch of story set in Mexico — a natural opening to the Hispanic community — and Mexico has a genre built for the moment: the corrido, which tells stories of oppression, conflict, victories and defeats between two sides.
How it works
More than half a billion people speak Spanish, and video games had never talked to them. Call of Duty's newest game was the opening: it featured Mexican characters and a stretch of story set in Mexico, a natural bridge to the Hispanic community.
Mexico had the missing instrument. El corrido is a popular genre built to tell stories of oppression, conflict, victories and failures between two sides — exactly the shape of a war game's heroes. So Banda MS joined the ranks and created an original corrido for Call of Duty, the first song in history to glorify the heroes of a video game.
The result gave Spanish-speaking players a Call of Duty anthem in a musical tradition they already owned. The work is preserved in the D&AD awards archive, which records no viewing figures, so the case rests on the idea itself.
Why it lands
- The campaign spoke through Mexico's own storytelling form: a corrido already narrates heroes, battles, victories and defeats, so the game's characters arrived pre-understood.
- A real corrido band joined the game's world instead of a brand faking the genre, so the song carried the tradition's authority.
- It claimed a first — the first song to glorify video game heroes — which turned the music itself into news.
- It treated identity as the message: the point was Spanish-speaking players seeing themselves in the game, not a list of features.
What it did
The music did the connecting: Spanish-speaking players met Call of Duty through a form Mexico uses to tell its own stories of conflict and victory. The work is preserved in the D&AD awards archive, which records no viewing figures.
What you can take
Don't translate your message into the audience's language — find the form their culture already uses for that kind of story, and let it carry your heroes.
Since then
The corrido stayed in the D&AD awards archive as an early case of a major video game commissioning original regional music instead of licensing an existing hit. The archive page records no viewing figures, so the legacy is the move itself: when an audience has a native form for heroes and battles, commissioning a song in that form can do what translated advertising cannot.
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