Bungie | Destiny

Case Study

Challenge

For the launch of “Destiny: The Taken King—The Legend of You,” Bungie, AKQA, and Activision sought a highly personalized campaign capable of transforming player achievements into shareable cinematic content. The objective was to celebrate each player's unique Destiny journey while creating a scalable experience that could generate and distribute millions of personalized videos across PlayStation, Xbox, and PC gaming communities.

Approach

Working with AKQA, Bungie, and Activision, I helped deliver a platform that transformed player achievements into personalized cinematic experiences. By combining gameplay history, progression milestones, and Destiny footage, players could instantly generate and share custom trailers celebrating their unique accomplishments throughout the game.

Together, we identified the gameplay metrics, progression markers, and ranking criteria most meaningful to the Destiny community. The resulting experience delivered a visually rich, hardware-accelerated HTML5 presentation with a low barrier to entry, encouraging broad participation across multiple gaming platforms.

Utilizing official Destiny character models, we optimized assets for WebGL delivery to maintain visual fidelity while creating a highly interactive cross-platform experience.

To support a high-profile global campaign, we deployed our in-house dynamic video rendering platform to Amazon Web Services (AWS) using AWS CloudFormation templates. The system was engineered to scale rapidly while generating and delivering millions of personalized videos.

To create a seamless player experience, we integrated with PlayStation Network, Xbox, and PC gaming services through their respective APIs. An abstraction layer simplified future integrations and accommodated ongoing platform updates.

Within two weeks, more than 2 million personalized videos were generated and shared. Driven by strong community participation and organic distribution, “Destiny: The Taken King” surpassed previous PlayStation sales records and became one of the expansion’s most successful promotional campaigns.

Recognition

• Custom Player Trailer Video
• AdAge article: Destiny Rewards High-Scoring Gamers With Personalized Trailer and a Message from the Taken King
• Game Rant article: The Taken King Custom Trailer Spotlights Players’ Guardians
• Shots article: Destiny’s Custom Trailers for The Taken King