Resident Evil's 'The Choice is Yours' by Biborg used interactive YouTube TrueView ads in the UK to let players choose between Leon and Claire before the
Resident Evil Turns YouTube Into a Survival Horror Choose-Your-Path
Resident Evil's 'The Choice is Yours' is a January 2019 digital campaign created by Paris-based agency Biborg for Capcom EMEA and the UK market, deploying interactive YouTube TrueView ads that allowed viewers to choose between protagonists Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield, triggering separate branching video paths designed to mirror the decision-making tension at the heart of the Resident Evil 2 remake.
The campaign launched in the United Kingdom in direct alignment with the Resident Evil 2 remake's global release date of January 25, 2019, as confirmed by Capcom's official release schedule. Each video branch ran to approximately 1.5 minutes in total, with multiple individual videos connected through YouTube end cards, creating a self-contained interactive narrative experience within a platform viewers already occupied daily. The mechanic was elegant in its simplicity: a viewer's character choice at the outset determined the survival-horror path they would witness, translating the game's core duality into the advertising unit itself.
Capcom EMEA commissioned the work specifically for the United Kingdom, positioning the campaign as a prestige digital moment around one of the most anticipated remake releases in gaming history. Biborg, a specialist in interactive and social advertising for video game clients, constructed the experience to function entirely within YouTube's native TrueView infrastructure, requiring no additional app, redirect, or download from the viewer. The campaign sits within the Gaming category and represents a single, precisely engineered media asset that uses format innovation rather than media weight to generate impact. Clapboard rates this campaign 61 out of 100, reflecting its strong conceptual alignment and technical ambition set against the limitations inherent in a single-market, single-asset execution.
Biborg's central strategic insight was that the Resident Evil franchise is defined by consequence. Every room entered, every item used, every route chosen carries mortal stakes — and that logic could be transposed directly into an advertising format without distortion. Rather than describing gameplay in a trailer, the agency placed the viewer inside the game's decision architecture from the first second of the ad experience.
The United Kingdom represented a mature and competitive gaming market in early 2019. According to Newzoo, the global games market generated revenues of approximately 148.8 billion dollars in 2019 with 7.2 percent year-on-year growth, and console gaming — the primary platform for Resident Evil 2 — accounted for a substantial share of that figure. In the UK specifically, Capcom faced a crowded action and survival-horror shelf, competing directly with franchises such as EA's Dead Space series and Konami's Silent Hill catalogue, both of which had established loyal genre audiences. The remake had to announce itself not as nostalgia but as an event worthy of discovery on its own terms.
YouTube TrueView's skippable pre-roll environment presented an additional strategic challenge: viewers can abandon an ad within five seconds. By opening with an immediate, personalised choice — Leon or Claire — Biborg converted the skip impulse into a participation impulse. The branching structure meant that a viewer who selected one character had a structural reason to return and watch the alternative path, effectively doubling potential viewing time from a single campaign asset. This architecture addressed both the attention economy problem and the franchise's dual-protagonist narrative in a single creative decision, making the strategy and the creative execution functionally inseparable.
Artistic director Olivier Campion and lead motion designer Benjamin Gommard anchored the visual execution of 'The Choice is Yours', shaping a campaign that had to feel authentically cinematic within the compressed and often low-attention context of a YouTube pre-roll unit. Creative copywriter Thomas Purbeck shaped the narrative framing, while project manager Chloe Walter coordinated production across a team that also included account manager Sergio Nieves, agency managers Kais Ali Benali and Bruno Luriot, brand manager Stefano Barolo, and marketing director Antoine Molant on the Capcom EMEA side, as documented by adsoftheworld.com.
Production was handled entirely by Biborg. The creative team drew directly from Capcom's in-game footage and assets, building a branching experience that felt native to Resident Evil 2's visual identity rather than a promotional abstraction of it. Kais Ali Benali stated, as reported by adobomagazine.com, that the agency worked with Capcom to capture the gameplay to ensure the campaign reflected the game's actual look and survival-horror atmosphere, grounding the viewer's choice in a world they recognised or were being introduced to for the first time.
The technical craft centred on YouTube's end card functionality, repurposed here not as a post-view afterthought but as the campaign's primary navigational mechanism. Each video segment concluded with end cards that served as interactive waypoints, pulling the viewer deeper into the branching structure rather than releasing them back into the platform's algorithm. The result was a contained but genuinely interactive experience built on infrastructure that required no proprietary technology — only a precise understanding of how to engineer emotional momentum within YouTube's existing toolkit. In the United Kingdom, where gaming content consumption on YouTube was already deeply embedded in audience behaviour, this native approach reduced friction and increased the likelihood of sustained engagement.
Verified performance data for 'The Choice is Yours' places the campaign among the more measurable interactive gaming executions of its period. According to adobomagazine.com, 33 percent of viewers who encountered the campaign continued into the branching experience rather than skipping, and of those who entered the experience, 85 percent watched through to completion. These figures, set against the standard skip behaviour associated with YouTube TrueView pre-roll advertising, indicate that the character-choice mechanic produced a meaningful and above-average retention effect.
The structural logic behind these results is legible. A viewer who has already made a choice — Leon or Claire — has exercised a micro-commitment that increases the cost of abandonment. Behavioural economics identifies this as a consistency bias: having acted, the viewer is more inclined to follow through. The 85 percent completion rate among those who opted in suggests that the content itself justified the initial decision, with Capcom's gameplay footage and Biborg's motion design sustaining attention through to the end card navigation point.
In the United Kingdom, where the remake was launching into a market primed by nostalgia for the 1998 original and by Capcom's sustained pre-launch communications, the campaign functioned both as an awareness driver and a product demonstration. The single-asset structure meant that every metric was concentrated in one experience, making the engagement numbers a direct reflection of creative quality rather than media spread. Clapboard's score of 61 out of 100 acknowledges the campaign's genuine formal innovation while noting that its impact, by design, was bounded by a single digital format and a single geographic market.
'The Choice is Yours' is an interactive digital campaign created by Biborg for Capcom in the United Kingdom in January 2019. It used branching YouTube TrueView ads to let viewers choose between Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield, mirroring the Resident Evil 2 remake's dual-protagonist structure and releasing in alignment with the game's January 25 launch date.
Biborg created the campaign for Capcom EMEA. The Paris-based agency specialises in interactive and social advertising for video game clients. Key credits include artistic director Olivier Campion, lead motion designer Benjamin Gommard, and creative copywriter Thomas Purbeck, as documented by adsoftheworld.com.
Viewers selected either Leon Kennedy or Claire Redfield at the start of the ad. That choice triggered a specific branching video path of approximately 1.5 minutes, assembled through YouTube end cards. According to adobomagazine.com, 33 percent of viewers entered the experience and 85 percent of those completed it.
According to adobomagazine.com, 33 percent of viewers who encountered the campaign opted into the branching experience, and 85 percent of those viewers watched through to completion. These figures reflect above-average retention for a YouTube TrueView pre-roll format, driven by the character-choice mechanic's micro-commitment effect.
The campaign was published in the United Kingdom in January 2019, timed directly to the Resident Evil 2 remake's release date of January 25, 2019, as confirmed by Capcom's official schedule. It ran as a digital-only execution across YouTube's TrueView pre-roll format within the UK market.
Clapboard rates 'The Choice is Yours' 61 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strong conceptual alignment between format and franchise identity and its measurable engagement results, weighed against the structural constraints of a single-asset, single-market digital execution targeting the United Kingdom gaming audience.
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