Microsoft launches fall 2023 Xbox ad campaign with new commercial that includes Hellblade II

Officially, the holiday shopping season doesn't start for over a month, but Microsoft isn't wasting any time launching its big fall/holiday marketing campaign for its Xbox game console.

Xbox Wire states that the new campaign has the tagline "Power Your Dreams". Microsoft has already posted a new three minute long live action commercial to jump-start the campaign. It will be shown during the NFL Thursday Night Football game on Amazon Prime Video later tonight and will be shown globally through the holiday season.

The commercial itself is called Wake Up and Dream, and shows a young gamer dreaming about going to video game worlds like the ones in Starfield, Forza Motorsport, and even a third-party game, Cyberpunk 2077.

The most interesting world the main character enters is from a game that won't actually be released this year. The gamer imagines she is in the world of Senua's Saga: Hellblade II from developer Ninja Theory. That game won't be released until sometime in 2024.

Josh Munsee, the Director of Microsoft's Xbox Integrated Marketing team, offered up some behind-the-scenes tidbits of the Wake Up and Dream commercial on his X (formerly Twitter) account. For example, when the young gamer sees Senua in that part of the clip, Munsee says that the character is played by the actor who voices and does her motion capture work in Hellblade II, Melina Juergens.

Munsee also states that the cinematographer for the commercial is Matty Libatique, who has a ton of feature film credits including, but not limited to, Iron Man 1 and 2, Venom, and the upcoming Maestro.

Finally, some people have speculated that the order of the numbers pressed on the elevator buttons in the commercial is some kind of Easter Egg puzzle, but Munsee has quickly denied that. Oh well.