Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 - The Korean Alley
Activision / Brand Activation

Role: Senior Creative Director (freelance), narrative and game layer design
Client: Activision
Partners: Amazon, Twitch
Locations: London and Los Angeles, opening the same day
Date: Ten days live, October 2026, closing on launch week of Modern Warfare 4
Format: A life size Korean back street, open to the public, with a scripted explosion, an Amazon "loot locker" mission and a live Twitch CCTV mission in London and LA. 

We built an ordinary Korean back street in London and Los Angeles, filled it with chicken shops, karaoke rooms and a launderette, then blew it up three times a night as a mirror reality to what happens inside the new game.

The Brief
Modern Warfare 4 opens in a Korean convenience store, with young South Korean soldiers mucking about by the snack shelves. Then North Korea invades.

Activision wanted that world built like a book nook, the tiny lit dioramas that slot between books on a shelf. Theirs was life sized and outdoors, a street you walk through rather than peer into. "A city inside a billboard" as we called it. 

The Street
Koreans call the narrow back alleys that hold a neighbourhood together golmok (골목). Our job was to build a working one, where the exotic and the mundane sit on top of each other.

Twelve shopfronts lined the alley, with a fortune teller's door at the far end. The stairs of a noraebang (a private karaoke room) glowed pink, a bicycle leaned outside the launderette and the herbalist's dried roots spilled out of their baskets. Overhead cables criss crossed above puddles that caught the neon.

The 'Moment'
Three times a day after sunset the street broke.

Outside 'Prestige Trade-in' a run down Game Exchange, Twitch creators and fans played the opening mission before anyone else on earth. When their screens hit the attack, the street outside ran the same scene at full size.

The power died shop by shop in three heavy thunks. Then silence, and a phone ringing upstairs. Three strikes landed down the alley, each bigger than the last, flames, pyro, smoke, debris fused with sound and video glitches to fuse realities. A game becoming a street, a street reflecting perfectly the start of a new gaming campaign. Propaganda leaflets fell from a balloon overhead. Then sirens and full colour slammed back in, while the karaoke track warped like a dying tape. 

Team Credits
Creative Direction – Matthew J Bennett
Production Design – Alice Helps Design
Lighting, Audio, Power & Technical Systems – Doug Hunt Sound & Light
Sound Design – Emmet O'Donnell
Video Design & Animation – Mesmer

Production & Technical Delivery – lookup
Project Director – Joe Kelly
Technical Director – Daniel Postlethwaite
Event Director – Tom O’Donnell
Creative Producer – Laura Clark
Event Manager - George Johnson

Scenic Fabrication, Construction & Installation – Illusion Design & Construct
Video Systems – Video Illusions,
Pyrotechnics & Special Effects – JustFX

Agencies – Omnicom / Hearts United / RapportWW
UK Agency Team – Thomas Rapley / Sandeep Ahluwalia / Saj Nazir / Frankie Farrow
US Agency Team - Danielle Bass / Rose Milgrom Kohn / Molly B