Watch the full ad here:

Kit's thoughts:

"PlayStation’s Double Life crawls under your skin and stays there.

Twenty-five years on, it still feels like a fever dream—a procession of faces staring through the camera, confessing secrets they shouldn’t. The grain bites. The lighting is brutal, unforgiving. The faces won’t let you go. Each one carries weight, damage, yearning.

“I have commanded armies and conquered worlds…” The voice rolls in, Shakespearean in its grandeur, with choral music swelling behind it. And yet it accompanies the aggressively mundane: a cyclist in an underpass, a man slumped in a bathtub, a pregnant woman in a bedsit. This soaring rhetoric of conquest and glory draped over concrete stairwells, chipped paint, fluorescent hum—it’s a collision that creates electric tension. You can’t reconcile what you’re hearing with what you’re seeing. And that dissonance is magnetic.

This was advertising as incantation—summoning something darker, stranger than a product demo. While the industry showed gleaming controllers and grinning families, PlayStation understood gaming’s dark magic: not just fun, but power. It positioned gaming as a portal to transcendence—a secret life where ordinary people become heroes, conquerors, legends.

For today’s sanitized, algorithm-tested ad landscape, Double Life is a brutal lesson: stop being so fucking polite. Marketers hooked on the crystal meth of pre-testing would never greenlight a vision this raw. Everything now must uplift, inspire, represent the best possible version of yourself. But Double Life understood something more potent: that every ordinary soul harbours extraordinary dreams. It didn't exploit weakness—it celebrated the human refusal to accept smallness. The real poetry isn't in the conquest rhetoric, it's in recognizing that we all command armies in our heads.

It reminds us that the most powerful work doesn’t catalogue features but excavates human truths, dramatized so intensely they make your teeth itch. Which is why, even now, it still haunts."