LOST RECORDS: Welcome to Velvet Cove.

In 2024, more than 19,000 games launched on Steam. For boutique studio Don’t Nod, the challenge wasn’t just breaking through the noise with its new IP Lost Records: Bloom & Rage. It was keeping fans engaged across an eight-week gap between its two-part release. With no AAA budget, no paid media, and no pre-existing fanbase, the campaign had to invent a community from scratch.

Instead of traditional advertising, HAUS of PARK designed an immersive, transmedia experience that blurred the line between game world and player world. The result: Velvet Cove, a social-first ecosystem where fans didn’t just consume content, they co-created the story.

The heart of the campaign was a custom Discord hub, an extension of the game’s fictional setting, Velvet Cove, complete with a welcome center, radio station, weekly missions, and live NPC interactions. Fans wrote fanfiction, role-played, and speculated together, generating nearly 400,000 organic messages. The community grew organically from zero to 3,000 members in mere weeks. Every fan interaction deepened their connection to the world, transforming a promotional space into a living community.
Anchoring it all was MoviePalaceOnline.com—a 90s-style, glitchy website built using Unreal Engine. Dripping with nostalgia and hidden secrets, it evolved each week with corrupted JPEGs and cryptic zip files. Fans cracked codes, posted Reddit explainers, built TikTok breakdowns, and created Instagram fan art. Social media became not a broadcast channel, but a stage for players to perform their theories, remix lore, and invite new audiences.

The numbers prove the impact of this fan-driven approach: over 24,000 players from 37 countries that participated in the ARG, half a million people reached across platforms, entirely organically. What’s more, 90% of surveyed players said they’d buy Don’t Nod’s next game because they enjoyed the experience so much. And all this with zero dollars spent on paid media.
Velvet Cove showed what happens when a campaign refuses to be confined by category. It was all of them at once: an organic, viral, transcategory movement that turned a release gap into a fandom engine.