Deploy the Santas
Picture a snow-covered plain filled with 4,000 identical Santa Claus figures, each armed with a candy cane, advancing toward an oncoming wave of penguins, not dozens, not hundreds, but 11,000, pressing forward so densely the ground is invisible. Total headcount: 15,000 characters, all moving, all colliding, all doing their thing simultaneously.
This is an actual promotional video, published on December 16, 2016, by Brilliant Game Studios, a Canadian developer based in North Vancouver, British Columbia. The setup is a territorial dispute over the North Pole: Santa has raised an army of clones to protect his toy operation; the penguins have mobilized as aggrieved locals. The candy-cane-wielding Santas are badly outnumbered and, to give away the ending, they lose.
It is completely absurd. It is also, once you understand what is being demonstrated, a clever piece of marketing.
Why Would Anyone Sell Software Like This?
Promotional material is supposed to communicate value. A racing game trailer shows you the cars; a shooter shows you the combat. So what does watching 11,000 penguins overwhelm a battalion of Santas communicate? On the surface it looks like an entertainment stunt, but the video makes you feel something before it explains anything: a sense of scale that no bullet-pointed feature list could produce. That feeling is not a side effect. It is the entire point.
The Chaos Is the Demo
The game being advertised is Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator (UEBS), a sandbox tool built on the Unity engine. Players assemble armies from a library of units, humans, animals, fantasy creatures, and watch them fight. There is no story, no campaign; the product is the simulation itself.
What makes it technically ambitious is the count. Running 15,000 independently moving, colliding, decision-making characters simultaneously is a serious demand on any engine. The video showcases a new crowd rendering system, terrain navigation, body accumulation, collision handling at scale. Think of it like a cooking demonstration using an unusual recipe: the point is never the dish, it is showing what the technique can do. A written description might say “improved crowd rendering with complex terrain navigation.” Accurate, but forgettable. The penguin army delivers the same claim as plain visual evidence, you see it working, and no amount of feature-list prose would hit the same way.
Brilliant Game Studios posted the game to Steam Greenlight on December 6, 2016, ten days before the video appeared. The simulator reached Steam Early Access on April 12, 2017, and fully released on June 2, 2017. Other scenarios include Chuck Norris against Roman soldiers, 10,000 chickens against a Roman army, and 20,000 Medieval soldiers against a single chicken.
One Small Problem with the Geography
The video casts penguins as native inhabitants of the North Pole fighting for their home territory. There is one quiet problem: penguins have never lived anywhere near the North Pole. Every wild penguin species is native to the Southern Hemisphere, Antarctica, southern South America, South Africa, New Zealand, the Galápagos. The Arctic has polar bears, Arctic foxes, and walruses. The “aggrieved locals” have never set a flipper in the neighborhood they are supposedly defending.
The Santas, at least, have a canonical claim to the North Pole. The penguins are intruders in the very conflict they are winning.