A whirlwind one-week international treasure hunt spanning seven cities in seven countries for supergroup Muse: Ununited Eurasia.

We worked with Muse and their management, Brontone, to produce an international treasure hunt in record-breaking time: from greenlight to live in one week, and a live treasure hunt lasting eight days. Taking direction from Matt Bellamy, we crafted a series of puzzles and challenges related to the geopolitical text The Grand Chessboard, taking the audience from Paris to New York through the rest of Eurasia, all the way unlocking portions of the band’s new single, United States of Eurasia.

With zero above-the-line advertising or marketing, Ununited Eurasia quickly caught the attention of fans worldwide, making an instantaneous impact.

The Cities

• Paris
• Berlin
• Moscow
• Dubai
• Tokyo
• Hong Kong
• New York

The Community

Our games are fantastic at encouraging community fanbases, and Ununited Eurasia was no exception. Here’s a selection of what our audience did:

• The Muse Supermassive Wiki: Ununited States of Eurasia
• Boards.muse.mu: “Thank you Muse!” – “So as you may have seen in the other thread we’ve decided to find a way to thank Muse, Muse management, and Six to Start (UnUSE’s web designers) for coming up with such an awesome and inventive way of releasing and promoting United States of Eurasia. And also cause it’ll be fun. And everyone can get involved no matter where you live, as long as you can record and upload a video!”
• Over two message boards and forums (board.muse.mu and muselive, the fan community wrote over 27,000 messages and generated over 730,000 message views)
• Nearly 600 items in the Project United Eurasia Flickr pool and nearly 1200 members of the YouTube group

Flickr user gabbymerry

Flickr user Ladymakbet

The Numbers

• Nearly 50,000 registered users in a one-week period
• Over 560,000 unique visits over two weeks
• Over 200,000 unique visitors over two weeks
• Over 2.7m pageviews over two weeks
• An average of 6 minutes spent on site per session
• Visitors from over 160 countries
• Over 50,000 downloads of an exclusive MP3, United States of Eurasia
• Ununited States of Eurasia made trending topics on Twitter three times over the course of the week
• With Amazon Web Services, over 2 terabytes of data shifted in one week

Selected Media Coverage

• NME: “Muse have hidden several USB sticks in a worldwide treasure hunt – allowing fans to hear a new song. Fans can search for the USB sticks in Berlin, Tokyo, Hong Kong,Moscow, Paris and Dubai, where “agents” are looking after them. ”
• Live4ever: “The track from the forthcoming album ‘The Resistance’ has been spliced into several segments, and scattered on USB pen drives across the globe, spurring fans on a rat race unlike anything since the golden ticket hysteria seen in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.”
• Drowned in Sound: “Space-rock trio Muse have masterminded a worldwide treasure hunt for their fans, involving USB sticks being hidden in various cities across the globe.”
• The Quietus: “The band have hidden USB sticks throughout the world each containing a puzzle that, when completed, unlocks a brief snippet of ‘United States Of Eurasia’ that will appear on their forthcoming album The Resistance, released September 14.”
• Musicradar: “Muse are offering fans a chance to hear a new song called United States Of Eurasia by way of a global treasure hunt involving four hidden USB sticks. The sticks, each containing a code that must be entered on the microsite Unitedeurasia.muse.mu, allows users to access a puzzle which, when solved, can unlock part of the song.”
• Glasswerk: “Muse have launched a global treasure hunt for fans to find hidden USB sticks which hold the bands new songs.”
• Xfm: “Muse are offering a tantalising preview of their new album ‘The Resistance’… but you have to take part in a worldwide Treasure Hunt to find it! The band have placed a code on six USB sticks, which have ended up with so-called agents in Berlin, Dubai, Hong Kong, Moscow, Paris and Tokyo.”
• We are Social: “only last week fans of Muse managed to get the band’s ARG to the sixth most popular trends on Twitter“
• BBC Radio 1: Jo Whiley and Zane Lowe.

Credits

• At Six to Start: Dan Hon (Exec Producer), Kim Plowright (Project Management), Lisa Long (Logistics), Robin Ray (Project Management), Dean Vipond (Graphics), Eric Harshbarger (Puzzle Design), Phil Gyford (Development)
• At Muse / Brontone: Sam Sparrow