Humble Bundle — Staff Picks Bundle: Glen

One of the hallmarks of Humble Bundle is the Humble Indie Bundle (HIB). That was what gave rise to the company and, in a way, an entire industry. HIB is an occasional curated assortment of popular indie video games sold at a pay-what-you-want price.

Most bundles that the company sells are publisher-focused or thematic, but then there are bundles like HIB and the Humble Jumbo Bundle, which don’t really have a theme beyond just being a quality curated list.

But one day a business developer came to our creative team with a problem: he had games fit for a HIB or Jumbo, but it wasn’t time yet for one of those. So he wondered if we could come up with a third theme for non-themed bundles.

That’s where we came up with this dumb idea: what if we made a Staff Picks bundle like at a video or record store? We’d invent a fake staff member, and then whenever needed, we could invent another one.

Enter: Glen the Gargoyle.

We created a backstory and everything for Glen. He was gargoyle on Humble Bundle HQ who liked video games, so we gave him a shot at curating a bundle.

Then we proceeded to use him in all of our marketing collateral. Sadly, I don’t have screenshots of the bundle itself, but I do have all of these assets we created for social media. These would appear across channels as we promoted the bundle and the games within it:

If any of those made no sense, it’s because there were usually tweets or posts alongside them. That, or they may be referring to a specific game.

We got to a point where we were having so much with Glen that we even did an AMA-style thing on Twitter called “Ask me Glenything.”

This one I really regret not taking a screenshot of because we answered questions in real-time and engaged with our community on this silly joke.

But the bundle did well! Sales-wise and engagement-wise. Afterwards, we concluded it with a post to our Instagram: