10 Insanely Cool Ways Video Games Were Revealed

First impressions are important; marketing budgets exist for a reason. If a publisher fails to get the public excited about its next big game off the bat, it's already starting on the back foot. There are no redos in advertisement, so the best way to stack the deck, so to speak, is to go balls-to-the-wall with promotion.

That can come in the form of a dry press release, showy trailer, or "accidental" leak. All fine methods of delivery, but a far cry from the lengths some industry leaders are willing to go to, to ensure you're ready to hit pre-order before a release date is even available.

Bungie and Rocksteady are fans of the Easter egg approach — sneaking hints for unconfirmed sequels into their existing titles. Creative? Absolutely, but also prone to backfiring, especially for the latter studio, which ultimately had to guide Arkham Asylum players towards an impossible-to-find, in-game Arkham City reveal long after it was public knowledge.

Then you have the antics of a certain auteur. Hideo Kojima's approach frankly exceeds all the competition. To say nothing of the fact that P.T. ended up being a critically acclaimed masterpiece despite being a bite-sized teaser for Silent Hills, there's another meta take on the pre-release hype cycle he's responsible for, and you probably didn't even know it.

"Destiny Awaits."

What did the cryptic text adorning a specific poster in Halo 3: ODST mean, exactly? Until Bungie announced its first brand-new IP in 2013 after parting ways with Microsoft, diddly squat. It may as well have been the unremarkable set dressing all had initially assumed it to be. 

Not long after ODST's release, fans had suspected that the Easter egg, which showed up in a handful of locations during the spin-off's runtime, was a teaser for something. Still, four years would pass until the studio, now independent, would deliver the final piece of the jigsaw and reveal Destiny (and another four years after that, until it would be released). 

There's not a cat in hell's chance that anyone could have put two and two together based on what little information was available at the time, of course, but it's a cute attempt at alternative marketing, nonetheless. 

Fun fact: when ODST was re-released as part of The Master Chief Collection in 2014, the poster's original slogan was replaced wholesale with the text "For Her" and the Traveller removed, likely for copyright reasons.