PlayStation 2 climbs Mountain by Frank Budgen for TBWA London

A human pyramid as a metaphor for play

On 13 November 2003, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe premiered Mountain, a 60 second cinema and television film for the PlayStation 2 directed by Frank Budgen and produced through Gorgeous Enterprises for TBWA London.^{1, 2} The film opened across 30 markets in Europe and Asia in a single rollout and ran on broadcast and cinema screens through the European holiday season.^{1, 3} It followed Double Life in 1999 and The Third Place in 2000, but ran inside the Fun, Anyone? campaign that had replaced The Third Place in 2003, and it closed on the line Fun, Anyone?^{1, 4, 5}

Mountain was a single allegorical scene, shot in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.^{1, 3, 5} A crowd of citizens ran through city streets to the side of a building and began to climb each other. The pile grew. New arrivals added themselves to the structure. Bodies rose, fell, were caught, were lifted again, and the camera moved upward with the growing tower until one figure after another reached a peak that did not exist before the crowd built it, only to be thrown back down so that the next could take the top. The film closed on the line Fun, Anyone?, followed by PlayStation 2: Play the world online.^{1, 5}

The strategic problem TBWA London was answering

By late 2003, the PlayStation 2 had been on sale in Europe for three years and was approaching the mid-life of its console generation.⁶ The launch energy of The Third Place had faded, and the Microsoft Xbox had widened its installed base across Western Europe. Sony Computer Entertainment Europe needed a film that could re-state the brand argument without restarting it, and that could give retailers and partners a fresh creative anchor for the Christmas trading period without abandoning the equity that the Fun, Anyone? platform had built.

The brief that TBWA London wrote was therefore a continuation brief rather than a launch brief. The agency took the platform proposition that the PlayStation 2 was a second world the audience could enter and asked what kind of behaviour that second world made possible. The answer landed on collective ambition. A single player could be a hero in a game, but a crowd of players, climbing each other to reach a peak that none of them could reach alone, was a more precise metaphor for what the PS2 audience had become four years into the original PlayStation legacy. The metaphor allowed the platform to talk to the existing audience as a community rather than as a set of buyers.

The production and the director

Frank Budgen had already won the 2002 Cannes Lions Film Grand Prix for the Nike Tag commercial through Gorgeous Enterprises, and was by 2003 one of the directors with the strongest commercial reputation in Europe.^{5, 7} His selection for Mountain signalled that Sony Computer Entertainment Europe was treating the European platform with the same authorship-led approach that had governed the original David Lynch and Chris Cunningham commissions. Budgen was paired with Tony McTear, Paula Marcantonio and the TBWA London creative team, who had been the architects of the platform from the original Double Life film onwards.⁸

The shoot combined practical performance with extensive visual effects. Trade reporting at the time recorded a production that involved 50 stuntmen and acrobats for the central pyramid sequence and around 500 extras per day on the larger crowd scenes.^{1, 5, 7} The choreography of bodies climbing, slipping, and recovering was rehearsed in advance, and the cut intercut multiple takes of the structure assembling and reassembling. In post-production The Mill added crowd replication, set extensions and 146,000 digital characters created with the crowd simulation software Massive.¹ The combination of real bodies at the centre of the frame and simulated crowds around them was central to the film's authority.

The argument the film made

Mountain extended the platform argument that PlayStation marketing had been making since 1999. Double Life had introduced the proposition that players led two lives at once. The Third Place had named the second life as a place between reality and fantasy. Mountain added a final move. The second place was not just a destination, it was a landscape that the players themselves built. The film took the agency of play, which is the central pleasure of the medium, and made it the visible centre of the spot. No one in the film was instructed to climb. The crowd organised itself.

The economic effect of the work was measurable. Sales of the PlayStation 2 exceeded the targets that Sony Computer Entertainment Europe had set for the trading period, and the console's share of the global video game market increased over the period that Mountain was in air, from around 74 to around 77 per cent of the 13 billion US dollar segment as it was sized in 2003.¹ The film also entered the European awards circuit and was widely cited inside trade press at the time as one of the strongest PlayStation films in the platform's history.^{1, 3, 7}

What the film continues to model

Mountain is a useful reference for any brand asking how to extend a platform proposition without restarting it. It demonstrated that a third platform film, four years into a creative cycle, can deepen a brand argument rather than dilute it. It demonstrated that an authorship-led production can combine practical performance and digital crowds without losing its sense of physical truth. It also demonstrated, in line with Double Life and The Third Place, that PlayStation marketing was strongest when it staged the audience as the centre of the action and let the hardware sit silently behind the line. That continuity, more than any single film, was the brand asset.