‘Dispatch’ Hits 5 Million Players; AdHoc Studio Books LA Concert

AdHoc Studio has booked a live concert to mark the first anniversary of “Dispatch,” its episodic superhero narrative game, which has now passed 5 million players. The one-night show, “Dispatch: Night Shift,” takes place Dec. 3 at the Avalon Hollywood nightclub in Los Angeles. Doors open at 6 p.m.; the show starts at 7.

Composer Andrew Arcadi will perform the game’s original score live, with the score threading the sets together. Select soundtrack artists join him: Thot Squad, Bershy, Primer, Caroline Kingsbury and Fartbarf, playing tracks from “Dispatch” and their own albums.

Tickets are “extremely limited,” per the studio. Pre-sale opens Oct. 28 through AdHoc’s email list, capped at two tickets per person.

How did the concert come about?

AdHoc chief operating officer Nick Herman and CEO Michael Choung — both studio founders — say the idea dates to January, when musicians from the soundtrack began asking to use game assets in their own live sets.

“It felt like there was an opportunity here where we have our fans going to their shows. Why don’t we create a place for everyone and have basically like a mini-festival and celebrate all this stuff,” Herman said.

The studio has never produced a concert, so it hired Banter Events to help. Herman embraces the inexperience: “As soon as we had the idea, it was like, ‘OK, this is gonna be overproduced, we’re gonna go crazy.’ … It’s kind of similar to ‘Dispatch’ where we had never made a premium animated television show through that pipeline. It’s kind of nice not knowing because then you just ask for crazy stuff, and then they go, OK, and then we’ll figure it out.”

Herman has had Night Shift “written in the top corner in permanent marker” since the start of the year, when the game was riding strong early sales and multiple 2025 Game Awards nominations.

Choung admits the planning was less than sober. “The energy, especially in January, was more drunk than sober in the sense that the success just walloped all of us,” he said. “We signed up for it knowing nothing about how to do this stuff.”

What else ships with the anniversary?

The studio has stacked the milestone with extras:

• A free Deluxe Edition update adding two modes: Commentary (more than 16 hours of cast and crew commentary) and Storyboard (the full game through original storyboard animatics). Existing Deluxe owners get both free; Standard owners can upgrade for $10.99.
• A mobile launch on Android and iOS, plus Google Play Games on PC, starting Dec. 9, 2026. The game is rebuilt for touch and vertical play; the first four episodes are free, with the full mobile release at $19.99.
• Anniversary merch featuring art by art director Derek Stratton, extending the designs of the three-record vinyl soundtrack set sold through Lost In Cult to shirts and hoodies. One hundred album-art posters signed by Stratton go on sale. AdHoc and Lost In Cult are also expanding into a “Dispatch: Design Works” hardcover book and collectible box with interviews from cast and developers.

The team behind the game, which has doubled in size since last October, has reason to celebrate. “Dispatch” stars Aaron Paul as Robert Robertson, a.k.a. Mecha Man, a dispatcher steering a dysfunctional team of misfit heroes while juggling office politics and a damaged suit. Laura Bailey, Erin Yvette and Jeffrey Wright round out the cast.

Herman says the launch has “given us confidence in our instincts.” It’s the studio’s first original IP: “Whenever there’s a weird idea, we’re like, ‘Well, maybe it’s not so weird, the last weird idea works.’”

Choung frames success as “a blank page” — “the best thing you can hand someone. It’s the worst thing you can hand someone.” The studio, he says, is in no rush to fill it, with “a lot of ideas and a lot of thoughts inside of the studio about what could be next.”