Thanks to Sony Online Entertainment’s campaign for Dragon’s Prophet, the world may have awakened to a new blend of entertainment. It’s dragons meet metal music, and it seems bound to spawn imitations. Watch the trailer and you feel as if every time a dragon comes on a screen, anywhere, there needs to be a guitar riff in the background. Imagine it in The Hobbit. A soft moaning guitar as we get a glimpse of Smaug awakening, then the jam winding up to 11 as Smaug desecrates the Lonely Mountain. Or in Skyrim, where every time you encounter a dragon, Jeremy Soule’s memorable soundtrack would fade away and Black Sabbath would kick in. A metal soundtrack definitely could’ve spruced up that ‘80s Disney flick Dragonslayer.
The Dragon’s Prophet trailer “The Ballad of DraGod” is the first in a series being produced by SOE and Ayzenberg. It sets an unexpected tone for the game, which in itself is an off-the-wall take on fantasy MMOs developed by Taiwan-based Runewaker Entertainment, the same folks behind Runes of Magic. Dragon’s Prophet is off-the-wall in that it has comedic twists and some quirks in its characters and storyline. But we don’t think the guys in Taiwan were thinking American “Super Metal” when they made the game.
“We struggled with how do we approach Dragon’s Prophet differently,” says Laura Naviaux, SVP Global Sales and Marketing at SOE. “I just didn’t want to make another trailer that was ‘explore your destiny’, ‘a hero’s journey’, it’s just so overplayed that we tried to come up with a new way to present the title.”
So far it seems the risk was worth taking. The first trailer has managed to pull in not just a steady stream of views but also a lot of social media buzz. According to Naviaux, people who may not have otherwise been drawn to a fantasy MMO are talking about the original song in the trailer, and mixing some of their own versions. As we said, the blend of dragons, metal, muscle-bound dudes and chicks in bikinis – for the men and women who love all of that, it’s more than memorable, it’s imitable.
We talked with Naviaux about what inspired the campaign.
