12 MORE Worst Video Game Marketing Campaigns (Part 1)

All natural? Nice. Maybe don't advertise your burgers with
gross pictures of what they'll look like after a month.
That's a quick way to make anyone not feel hungry anymore.

It’s that time of the year again, and instead of thinking up a new idea for a Top 12, I’m going back to a well I began exploring two years ago. As I said at the time, marketing is a fascinating field to study and discuss. Some marketing campaigns have practically changed the world for the better. And on the opposite end of the scale, there have been several embarrassing campaigns; oh well, wipe the slate clean, try again later. That is, unless the marketing campaign bankrupted the damn company; you’d be surprised how often that did happen.

When it comes to video games, it’s as if anything goes. The target audience is kids and teens, sometimes families or adults. Such campaigns were aired as TV spots or as full pages in print magazines for a long time. In the age of the Internet, we see a lot of campaigns thanks to YouTube and on various social media platforms. And although the Web may be great to promote your product, it can become a double-edged sword.

SEGA does what Nintendon't. Like pissing jokes.

In the original two-part article that I wrote on the topic, I overplayed my hand. If you reread it, you’ll notice that I frequently talk about more than one disastrous campaign at a time. Maybe I should have kept some on the side, just in case I wanted to do another of these, right? Well… During my research for this new list, I found several more promotions that went haywire and gave exactly the wrong kind of attention to the product. But hey, you know what they say: Even bad publicity is still publicity.

This time around, I’ll leave more room for types of campaigns and stunts that weren’t as prevalent in the original list. Other than that, everything’s on the table, games and consoles alike. After all, failing to adequately promote a console means that said console’s entire library of games is at risk of underselling.

Be aware that some topics discussed may be heavy, and some images may be disturbing.

12. Bloodvertising

Oh, this is gonna be funny.

Just as they opened my previous list, Acclaim once more find themselves at the front of the line. Some companies have left their mark in the world of crazy advertising, and there are plenty of examples; but few have gotten as tasteless and horrid as some of the ideas that Acclaim’s marketing team came up with.

To say it in the nicest manner, they went batshit crazy. I’ve already given three examples. There are two more, and yes, I’m knocking them out today, because these guys are too crazy to stick around for a potential third list.

Acclaim had been working on the hack-and-slash Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance for PS2, Xbox and PC, released in North America on November 4th, 2003. What was the idea? “Bloodvertising!” Cartridges of red ink were placed behind clear sheets, on the sides of bus shelters where ads for this Gladiator game were displayed in the UK. The result? Blood-like red dripping from these installations and onto the pavement. Oh, but don’t worry about the environmental risk – Acclaim’s got a team to clean it all up after the six days of the campaign are over.

Man, living in the UK in the early 2000s was WILD. Just how many of these crazy stunts happened over there specifically? Every week, you wouldn’t know what you were going to experience. Fake bloodied body parts scattered around London? Bleeding bus shelters? Can we go back to those interesting times, instead of the ones we have now?

"Kill Bill: Volume 2" would get a samilar idea later.
(Sorry, couldn't find a pic of the Acclaim ad!)

By this point I think there isn’t one single game that caused their bankruptcy, it’s the accumulation of insane crap that did them in. After Acclaim’s bankruptcy, Throwback Entertainment picked up the rights to Gladiator and re-released it to online platforms in 2015. They were wise enough to not do something insane for the occasion.

11. Zynga’s counterfeit money in San Francisco

Just another Facebook or mobile game.

If you’ve ever played Farmville or Words with Friends back when people gave a damn about the Gaming section of Facebook, then you’ve heard of Zynga. The company is infamous for its many clones of other popular concepts, or its shady business and development practices; doing even a tiny bit of research on them for this segment led me to tons and tons of things to be wary about whenever playing their mobile games.

One of their many copycats is Mafia Wars: Las Vegas, in which you build a mafia empire for yourself while competing with other wannabe mafiosi. (And yes, they did get sued over the similarities with another game, Mob Wars.) During its life, Zynga went all-out with ideas across the country. In New York, people found their cars adorned with decals of gunshots advertising heists going down “in the neighborhood”. In Nevada, rapper Snoop Dogg was given a 4-ton armored truck to blow up in the middle of the desert, an event aired on Ustream bringing no less than two million views.

I thought the real issue here was having any sort of paper
pretending to be money (read: counterfeits?) tossed around.
Nope, just littering.

Their other idea wasn’t as warmly received. In San Francisco, agency David Ellen Advertising glued over four thousand fake 25,000$ bills to the sidewalks in 75 locations across the city, with the bills showing a link towards the game and a code to redeem that granted an extra, you guessed it, 25,000$ of in-game currency. Neat little boost, right? Well, San Francisco wasn’t told about the idea, and they weren’t too pleased. Cleaning up the mess was costly, and the city’s attorney even seriously considered suing. The two parties eventually settled on a 45,000$ fine.

Mafia Wars eventually shut down in 2016. This specific stunt is a reminder, you’ll see it a lot, that companies should double-check what their hired ad agencies decide to do with their name.

10. Free gas in a world in flames!

Electronic Arts and Pandemic Studios’ Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, released on August 31st, 2008 (and September 4th on PC), is the story of a mercenary group being hired for a series of missions with their goal being to overthrow the Venezuelan government and kill its President. Jolly stuff all around. Gotta love those tales of provoking wars in other parts of the world.

Since part of the plot involves the country’s oil facilities, EA had an idea involving petrol stations… in London. See my previous comments about marketing stunts in the UK. The idea? Free gas for everyone! EA remodeled the station located on Last Stop Ltd, 73, Stapleton Hall Road into a military bunker, hired actors to play the parts of soldiers, and offered no less than 20,000£ of free gas to customers, at 40£ maximum per person.

People go insane for free stuff.

However, the chosen station wasn't in the best place to withstand a sudden massive spike in customers, and word of mouth being what it is (who wouldn't go for free gas??), the promotion caused a miles-long gridlock that paralyzed the city for hours. The stunt was disbanded by police a few hours in due to the risk caused by the line-up, and the promotion was later described by Member of Parliament Lynne Featherstone as "[...] irresponsible and downright dangerous".

And in case you’re wondering, Hugo Chávez, the president of Venezuela when the game was released, isn’t a fan. He hated it so much that Venezuela’s National Assembly voted a law banning all games that include objectives where the player must kill, a law made effective in March of 2010. Sources claim it’s an attempt at quelling the country’s rampant violent crime… S'all good, I'm used to video games being scapegoated.

9. I thought we were promoting a game console??!?

Dammit, I retroactively want to be there.

It’s strange to think that between the previous list I made and this one, only two years have passed. And yet, in that short time span, the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3)’s end was officially announced, leaving us with 25 years of presentations of consoles and games. One more casualty of the pandemic. Those in-person events must have been exhilarating to attend, and these presentations were a highlight of the year, building hype for what was to come. On the other hand, if studios and publishers realized that it was cheaper and less of a hassle to livestream their presentations online, whenever they felt like it…

We can’t deny the immense marketing power of the event while it lasted, though. Heck, that’s what it existed for. As I pointed out previously, promotion of upcoming games often outgrew the presentations. Still, those took centerstage, and they could garner interest in an upcoming title or console… save a product that wasn't on the right track... or finish killing it.

Yusuf Mehid presenting all of the console's features...
...except the one people actually came to see.

However, this story begins before E3. In 2013, Microsoft held a press conference at the Xbox Campus in Redmond, Washington, during which they unveiled the Xbox One (a name that still confuses many). The 90-minute conference began with Xbox president Don Mattrick showing off the machine, with a slew of details: Multimedia capabilities! A step towards Intelligent TV! Netflix! Skype! An NFL partnership! …Wait, what? I think we may be forgetting the “game console” aspect here. It took 30 minutes before games were even brought up.

Wisely, the E3 presentation showed a lot of games coming
for the One. But it also opened admitting that people
could just get a 360 and be happy...

Well, worry not, more announcements were made: The Xbox One would always be online, requiring a persistent Internet connection. It wouldn’t be backwards-compatible with the 360, with the company intending to sell both consoles concurrently. Oh, and Digital Rights Management? If you share games with friends, forget about it, Microsoft says no. They don’t like the secondhand market much either. The One would always come packaged with a Kinect camera (because everyone loved the Kinect, right?). The price? 499$.

The backlash was intense. Microsoft walked back the “always on” and DRM statements, but the accumulation of errors from that conference was too much. Their E3 morning conference attempted to course-correct, but it was too little too late. Fans had made up their minds, and the competitors happily threw shade at Microsoft’s many faux pas. Sony, whose conference was in the afternoon, had a field day with it.

Yeah, PlayStation won that year. Heck, we can say Xbox still hasn’t fully recovered, despite their best efforts since.

8. All I want for Christmas… Isn’t a PSP

Hoo boy, PlayStation’s answer to Nintendo’s portables had it rough.

In all of its 2006 Internet pixelated beauty.

One technique pulled by marketing firms is to pretend to be a fan of the product being advertised, drumming up interest by having the “average person” speak on their behalf. With the right promotional tools, this could work. However, it takes subtlety. And not every firm can manage that.

In 2006, the Christmas season was coming and Sony wanted to steal the thunder in the portable market. Firm Zipatoni was hired to create a viral campaign using the then fresh and new YouTube. The result? A "kid" named Charlie, who loves being able to play games on the go on his PSP, and wants to get one for his friend Jeremy. The campaign came with a now defunct website, shaped like an unprofessional blog, to make it look as much as possible like an actual teen’s work. As for how the blog was promoted? Well, there was this little video…

I hate the word “cringe”, it’s been overused since 2016, but damn if it isn’t accurate here. This obviously grown-up man playing it cool while he raps poor lyrics, poorly. Yeah, the intention was to look unprofessional. Online sleuths easily found the actual source of the blog, so Sony became an object of ridicule and pulled the ad, apologizing for trying to be “just a little too clever”. But then, why is the video here? Gotta thank the Streisand Effect for this one.

The blog mentions him, but the video doesn’t; I think “Jeremy” got done dirty with this one.

Hey, they’ll do better next time, like when they'll announce a white version of the portable console, surely this cannot go horribly wrong OHWAIT.

7. Birds don’t care about Virtua Tennis

A page is turning, this is officially the final bonkers advertising campaign I could find from Acclaim. Off they’ll go, like a recurring villain never bad enough to be the main threat. I had heard of this one before, but I didn’t think it was bad enough to share in my previous list on the subject.

This is a classic sport. It should not involve the wildlife.

What was their hair-brained scheme this time? Well, the plan was to advertise their latest sport game, Virtua Tennis 2. It would make sense to take advantage of a current competition in the same sport, right? Well, they were in luck, as the biggest tennis competition in the world, Wimbledon, is in London, England. Just flash some ads there, set up a demo booth, have a plane with a banner, hey, let’s go crazy and get a white zeppelin with the game’s logo on it to fly over. No, wait, I have a better idea. Birds.

Birds?

This is a dramatization. (No pictures of birds with logos on
them were found; like many of Acclaim's stunts, this was
20 years ago, so images are rare if they're anywhere at all.)

Yes, birds. Let’s paint the logo on pigeons and train them to specifically land near people so that our logo will be seen by all. We’ll use harmless water-based paint, so it won’t be dangerous, we’re not monsters. They would also be released at specific moments, so not during the matches themselves, and only during warm-ups. Let’s just appreciate how much damn work this entire operation had to be, from painting over feathers, to the training… It’s like a silly plot a cartoon would have come up with. (To be fair, that goes for all of Acclaim’s ideas.)

Calling them wildlife wouldn’t be accurate since they were trained, but still, leave the animals out of it! (By the way, though the others weren’t for video games, no, this is not the only times logos were painted on animals for events.)

Well, a lot of this was rather tame; much bigger mistakes are coming in Part 2.