T-dog
07-16-2009, 02:14 AM
From Gamespy, read this article, its a great read.
The Internet makes promotion easier than ever: Throw up a blurred screenshot from a helicopter passing over the developer's headquarters and a hundred blogs go into full CSI-mode. Content-starved sites suck up announcements like a nymphomaniac vacuum cleaner, so companies have to invent brand-new ways to screw up their PR strategies. And they do! Here we've gathered seven videogame advertising stunts which make that Aqua Teen Hunger Force bomb scare thing look like a good idea.
7. Kojima's Timer-to-a-Timer-to-a-What-the-Hell-Else-Would-It-Be
The "mysterious countdown" is the laziest attention-getter short of sleeping supermodels at a paparazzi convention. When Kojima Productions added a timer to its website this past May, it triggering a tidal wave of "What could this be?" over-analysis despite being slightly less mysterious than a puke-stained frat boy in The Case Of The Empty Keg.
Cryptic clues like "the number 5" and "the fact that Kojima is only known for ONE GODDAMN LICENSE" didn't stop half the blogs in the world from going on about Kojima's old game Snatcher, just to prove that a) they've heard of Snatcher and b) they don't understand that everyone else has the Internet too.
If you didn't realize it was Metal Gear within one second of seeing the timer, seek immediate medical help: The severe head injury you've taken has destroyed your memory of the accident. Proving that the Kojima crew were taking the piss, the timer ticked down to reveal another countdown (http://www.gamespy.com/articles/985/985824p1.html). "Haha!" the website said, "Were you waiting to see something? We knew you would! And we know we can insult you to your face and you'll still come back again!"
Forget hentai-collector pages and LOLcat galleries, if ever there was a webpage wasting peoples' lives, this was it.
6. Postal Insanity
Uwe Boll is bad videogame PR given human form, access to camera equipment, and a complete disregard for everything mankind has learned about narrative since cave paintings. He once made a House of the Dead movie that wasn't in a house, and his continued career is proof that no one in Hollywood can work the Internet. He can, though, which is why he started beating up anyone who said bad things about him (where "anyone" means "except the ones with the remotest chance of even being able to lift boxing gloves.")
But Boll's real brain-breakdown came in advertising "Postal," the cinematic equivalent of catching colorectal cancer from a stab wound. He YouTubed videos announcing (http://www.2404.org/news/4289/Boll-vs.-Bay:-FIGHT!) that he was boxing Michael Bay in Zaire. Which was news to Mr. Bay, and indeed to the entire "Knowing who Michael Bay is"-world. It was as convincing as a teen telling how he was totally banging this hot chick from Canada (you wouldn't know her) when her cheerleading twin sister came in and invited him to the Annual Naked Getting to Touch Boobs Festival. But somehow more tragic.
Bay's office responded by banning any mention (http://www.shootfortheedit.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1866) of the insanity on the Michael Bay forums. That's how pathetic it got: On a forum dedicated to discussing how great Pearl Harbor and Armageddon were, Boll has been banned for being too ridiculously stupid. And when Boll can say another director sucks without being struck by lightning, it's proof that either there is no God or He does not have an Internet connection.
5. EA's Brass Knucks
EA mailed out brass knuckles to anyone interested in The Godfather II. Amazingly, devices whose sole function is converting faces into mush are illegal. Even mailing them out had been illegal (http://kotaku.com/5207521/update-ea-ships-illegal-weapons-to-press-wants-them-back), in fact, so when EA politely asked everyone to mail them back they were actually inciting mass felony. We're not sure what it says about your game when you're trying to get every games journalist in the country arrested before its release, but it can't be good.
What were EA expecting people to do with the brass knuckles, anyway? These aren't cool fakes like a full-sized Lancer: The only possible effect of brass knucks is to destroy somebody's face (used correctly) or somebody's hand (used incorrectly). And while we hate to propagate stereotypes, the crossover between "gaming journalists" and "grizzled toughs hardened by a life on the streets" is smaller than Kratos's stamp collection. This was the most embarrassing thing you could do with brass knuckles short of breaking your hand while trying to knuckle a police officer.
4. Sony: Decapitating Livestock Since 2007
God of War embodies many male fantasies -- destroying your enemies, having an epic destiny, being able to run around shirtless without jiggling -- but "rummaging around inside decapitated animals" really shouldn't be one of them. And if it is, Sony double-really shouldn't be making games for you. At a God of War II promotional event Sony unveiled a decapitated goat and invited press to pull out its guts (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-451414/Slaughter-Horror-Sonys-depraved-promotion-stunt-decapitated-goat.html). When keen investigative journalists inquired "WTF?" they explained, "Don't worry, the guts are only offal." So they beheaded the goat, hollowed out its carcass and shoved the mashed up remains of other animals in there instead. Which is apparently "better" if you're working for Sony, or Hannibal Lecter appearing on Iron Chef's Halloween special.
Animal rights organizations complained as quickly as malnourished people can actually move, so Sony apologized and recalled 80,000 Official PlayStation magazines featuring the photos. It printed six dozen zillion copies without once thinking someone would have a problem with what's basically a pagan sacrifice to the PS2.
The most hilarious aspect was Sony's subsequent statement: "We are conducting an internal inquiry into aspects of the event in order to learn from the occurrence and put into place measures to ensure that this does not happen again." Damn, Sony, if you don't already have a "NO DECAPITATION OF ANIMALS ON COMPANY TIME" rule, and this actually becomes relevant, maybe you should stop hiring from Arkham Asylum.
3. EA's London Blockade
While promoting Mercenaries 2 Electronic Arts ran thousands of dollars over budget, jammed London traffic, triggered police intervention and even actual government censure, so they screwed up harder in real life than most people can manage in GTA. Spending over $50,000 converting a random gas station into a military depot (http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/200836/1962/Mercenaries-2-publicity-stunt-causes-London-traffic-chaos&cid=1242642701&ei=O9fDSLKZC420gQPo0v3JAw&usg=AFQjCNH9Bk86TF4NGuKwXhBxmJIpyng9SA), it gave 70 bucks of gas to anyone who stopped. So even if every single person had used the gas to drive out and immediately buy the game EA still would have lost money.
For the stunt to make any sense you had to know that Mercenaries 2 uses gas as currency, in which case, guess what? They didn't need to gridlock a chunk of world capital to get to you! Balance that against the thousands of people who didn't know about it before, and now think of it as "the game made by those assholes who made me late for work." Screw sacrificing goats on pagan altars, blocking London traffic for an hour generates enough negative vibes to summon Beelzebub. And while we don't want to make any untoward suggestions about how EA successfully sell the same damn sports games every year, we'd check the site of this stunt for runes and pentagrams.
Considering how the event was randomly placed and in the early morning work rush it probably cost about $30,000 per actual Mercenaries fan netted. If EA caused gridlock and involved the police for Mercenaries 2, it's going to have to crash a space shuttle into Big Ben when it releases a game anyone cares about.
2. Burnout 2: Now with Real-life Fatalities
Acclaim was already a Hall of Famer in the Museum of Messed Up Wackness (from that time it tried to desecrate the graves of the poor (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2002/mar/15/games.advertising)) when it said "Screw it, let's just start killing people!" Acclaim offered to pay the speeding fines (http://www.entertainmentopia.com/scripts/displayGame.php?id=13) of everyone in the UK for one day, and if there's a worse idea than "let everyone in the country ignore the speed limit," it's "let everyone in the country whose main driving experience is playing Burnout ignore the speed limit."
It also implied that the only possible downside of a speeding ton of barely controlled metal was a fine, and maybe having to replay the level (assuming that every pedestrian you hit on the way into the wall had saved recently). It was the most irresponsible stunt possible short of connecting random PlayStation controllers to real cars.
What's truly terrifying about this are the implications: Somewhere in Acclaim was an executive with control over hundreds of thousands of dollars, and when asked "what if we encouraged all the asshole boy racers in the country to speed on the same day?" he signed a great big check and said, "I see no possible problem with that." If Acclaim made Counter-Strike we'd have a new suspect for 9/11.
1. Biological Terrorism, Capcom-style
If your PR stunt ends without major media coverage but with police interest and the very real possibility of spreading plague in a major metropolitan city, you might have mixed up your "Public Relations" and "International Terrorism" folders. And be a Bond villain.
Capcom advertised Resident Evil 5 (which you might recognize as a game which needed about as much advertising as the sunrise) by scattering fake body parts around London (http://www.joystiq.com/2009/03/12/capcom-publicity-stunt-loses-realistic-fake-limbs-in-london/). Well, fake human parts -- the chicken livers used in the gore were very real, so when the limbs went missing (Capcom is apparently unfamiliar with what happens to unattended items in urban centers) it had to make an announcement that, "We may have hidden mobile disease-farms around the city. No, we don't have any demands, we just screwed up. Try not to die KTHXBAI!"
If Bible Adventures on the NES didn't trigger a plague from a wrathful God we really shouldn't be making man-made ones for other games. Especially games about plagues turning people into flesh-hungry killers, and especially-especially when those plague-killers remember how to use chainsaws!
OMG haha, some of these were new to me except the Sony Goat stunt.
Uwe boll is fucking epic, what he did had me laughing my ass off literally.
So londoners... Come across any body parts? lol
The Internet makes promotion easier than ever: Throw up a blurred screenshot from a helicopter passing over the developer's headquarters and a hundred blogs go into full CSI-mode. Content-starved sites suck up announcements like a nymphomaniac vacuum cleaner, so companies have to invent brand-new ways to screw up their PR strategies. And they do! Here we've gathered seven videogame advertising stunts which make that Aqua Teen Hunger Force bomb scare thing look like a good idea.
7. Kojima's Timer-to-a-Timer-to-a-What-the-Hell-Else-Would-It-Be
The "mysterious countdown" is the laziest attention-getter short of sleeping supermodels at a paparazzi convention. When Kojima Productions added a timer to its website this past May, it triggering a tidal wave of "What could this be?" over-analysis despite being slightly less mysterious than a puke-stained frat boy in The Case Of The Empty Keg.
Cryptic clues like "the number 5" and "the fact that Kojima is only known for ONE GODDAMN LICENSE" didn't stop half the blogs in the world from going on about Kojima's old game Snatcher, just to prove that a) they've heard of Snatcher and b) they don't understand that everyone else has the Internet too.
If you didn't realize it was Metal Gear within one second of seeing the timer, seek immediate medical help: The severe head injury you've taken has destroyed your memory of the accident. Proving that the Kojima crew were taking the piss, the timer ticked down to reveal another countdown (http://www.gamespy.com/articles/985/985824p1.html). "Haha!" the website said, "Were you waiting to see something? We knew you would! And we know we can insult you to your face and you'll still come back again!"
Forget hentai-collector pages and LOLcat galleries, if ever there was a webpage wasting peoples' lives, this was it.
6. Postal Insanity
Uwe Boll is bad videogame PR given human form, access to camera equipment, and a complete disregard for everything mankind has learned about narrative since cave paintings. He once made a House of the Dead movie that wasn't in a house, and his continued career is proof that no one in Hollywood can work the Internet. He can, though, which is why he started beating up anyone who said bad things about him (where "anyone" means "except the ones with the remotest chance of even being able to lift boxing gloves.")
But Boll's real brain-breakdown came in advertising "Postal," the cinematic equivalent of catching colorectal cancer from a stab wound. He YouTubed videos announcing (http://www.2404.org/news/4289/Boll-vs.-Bay:-FIGHT!) that he was boxing Michael Bay in Zaire. Which was news to Mr. Bay, and indeed to the entire "Knowing who Michael Bay is"-world. It was as convincing as a teen telling how he was totally banging this hot chick from Canada (you wouldn't know her) when her cheerleading twin sister came in and invited him to the Annual Naked Getting to Touch Boobs Festival. But somehow more tragic.
Bay's office responded by banning any mention (http://www.shootfortheedit.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1866) of the insanity on the Michael Bay forums. That's how pathetic it got: On a forum dedicated to discussing how great Pearl Harbor and Armageddon were, Boll has been banned for being too ridiculously stupid. And when Boll can say another director sucks without being struck by lightning, it's proof that either there is no God or He does not have an Internet connection.
5. EA's Brass Knucks
EA mailed out brass knuckles to anyone interested in The Godfather II. Amazingly, devices whose sole function is converting faces into mush are illegal. Even mailing them out had been illegal (http://kotaku.com/5207521/update-ea-ships-illegal-weapons-to-press-wants-them-back), in fact, so when EA politely asked everyone to mail them back they were actually inciting mass felony. We're not sure what it says about your game when you're trying to get every games journalist in the country arrested before its release, but it can't be good.
What were EA expecting people to do with the brass knuckles, anyway? These aren't cool fakes like a full-sized Lancer: The only possible effect of brass knucks is to destroy somebody's face (used correctly) or somebody's hand (used incorrectly). And while we hate to propagate stereotypes, the crossover between "gaming journalists" and "grizzled toughs hardened by a life on the streets" is smaller than Kratos's stamp collection. This was the most embarrassing thing you could do with brass knuckles short of breaking your hand while trying to knuckle a police officer.
4. Sony: Decapitating Livestock Since 2007
God of War embodies many male fantasies -- destroying your enemies, having an epic destiny, being able to run around shirtless without jiggling -- but "rummaging around inside decapitated animals" really shouldn't be one of them. And if it is, Sony double-really shouldn't be making games for you. At a God of War II promotional event Sony unveiled a decapitated goat and invited press to pull out its guts (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-451414/Slaughter-Horror-Sonys-depraved-promotion-stunt-decapitated-goat.html). When keen investigative journalists inquired "WTF?" they explained, "Don't worry, the guts are only offal." So they beheaded the goat, hollowed out its carcass and shoved the mashed up remains of other animals in there instead. Which is apparently "better" if you're working for Sony, or Hannibal Lecter appearing on Iron Chef's Halloween special.
Animal rights organizations complained as quickly as malnourished people can actually move, so Sony apologized and recalled 80,000 Official PlayStation magazines featuring the photos. It printed six dozen zillion copies without once thinking someone would have a problem with what's basically a pagan sacrifice to the PS2.
The most hilarious aspect was Sony's subsequent statement: "We are conducting an internal inquiry into aspects of the event in order to learn from the occurrence and put into place measures to ensure that this does not happen again." Damn, Sony, if you don't already have a "NO DECAPITATION OF ANIMALS ON COMPANY TIME" rule, and this actually becomes relevant, maybe you should stop hiring from Arkham Asylum.
3. EA's London Blockade
While promoting Mercenaries 2 Electronic Arts ran thousands of dollars over budget, jammed London traffic, triggered police intervention and even actual government censure, so they screwed up harder in real life than most people can manage in GTA. Spending over $50,000 converting a random gas station into a military depot (http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/200836/1962/Mercenaries-2-publicity-stunt-causes-London-traffic-chaos&cid=1242642701&ei=O9fDSLKZC420gQPo0v3JAw&usg=AFQjCNH9Bk86TF4NGuKwXhBxmJIpyng9SA), it gave 70 bucks of gas to anyone who stopped. So even if every single person had used the gas to drive out and immediately buy the game EA still would have lost money.
For the stunt to make any sense you had to know that Mercenaries 2 uses gas as currency, in which case, guess what? They didn't need to gridlock a chunk of world capital to get to you! Balance that against the thousands of people who didn't know about it before, and now think of it as "the game made by those assholes who made me late for work." Screw sacrificing goats on pagan altars, blocking London traffic for an hour generates enough negative vibes to summon Beelzebub. And while we don't want to make any untoward suggestions about how EA successfully sell the same damn sports games every year, we'd check the site of this stunt for runes and pentagrams.
Considering how the event was randomly placed and in the early morning work rush it probably cost about $30,000 per actual Mercenaries fan netted. If EA caused gridlock and involved the police for Mercenaries 2, it's going to have to crash a space shuttle into Big Ben when it releases a game anyone cares about.
2. Burnout 2: Now with Real-life Fatalities
Acclaim was already a Hall of Famer in the Museum of Messed Up Wackness (from that time it tried to desecrate the graves of the poor (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2002/mar/15/games.advertising)) when it said "Screw it, let's just start killing people!" Acclaim offered to pay the speeding fines (http://www.entertainmentopia.com/scripts/displayGame.php?id=13) of everyone in the UK for one day, and if there's a worse idea than "let everyone in the country ignore the speed limit," it's "let everyone in the country whose main driving experience is playing Burnout ignore the speed limit."
It also implied that the only possible downside of a speeding ton of barely controlled metal was a fine, and maybe having to replay the level (assuming that every pedestrian you hit on the way into the wall had saved recently). It was the most irresponsible stunt possible short of connecting random PlayStation controllers to real cars.
What's truly terrifying about this are the implications: Somewhere in Acclaim was an executive with control over hundreds of thousands of dollars, and when asked "what if we encouraged all the asshole boy racers in the country to speed on the same day?" he signed a great big check and said, "I see no possible problem with that." If Acclaim made Counter-Strike we'd have a new suspect for 9/11.
1. Biological Terrorism, Capcom-style
If your PR stunt ends without major media coverage but with police interest and the very real possibility of spreading plague in a major metropolitan city, you might have mixed up your "Public Relations" and "International Terrorism" folders. And be a Bond villain.
Capcom advertised Resident Evil 5 (which you might recognize as a game which needed about as much advertising as the sunrise) by scattering fake body parts around London (http://www.joystiq.com/2009/03/12/capcom-publicity-stunt-loses-realistic-fake-limbs-in-london/). Well, fake human parts -- the chicken livers used in the gore were very real, so when the limbs went missing (Capcom is apparently unfamiliar with what happens to unattended items in urban centers) it had to make an announcement that, "We may have hidden mobile disease-farms around the city. No, we don't have any demands, we just screwed up. Try not to die KTHXBAI!"
If Bible Adventures on the NES didn't trigger a plague from a wrathful God we really shouldn't be making man-made ones for other games. Especially games about plagues turning people into flesh-hungry killers, and especially-especially when those plague-killers remember how to use chainsaws!
OMG haha, some of these were new to me except the Sony Goat stunt.
Uwe boll is fucking epic, what he did had me laughing my ass off literally.
So londoners... Come across any body parts? lol