A game’s success is heavily dependent on the hype and publicity it gets prior to launch. Game companies either go for creative gimmicks in theme with the game’s flavor or sometimes they just go for extreme controversy to get the hype going.
listed below are my favorite gimmicks by game companies.
Red Faction’s Smash-a-Car Marketing Stunt
When THQ’s Red Faction: Guerilla was eleased in London, some crazy ass person in their marketing department thought “Hey! Let’s get a car, fill it up with copies of our game, chain a sledge hammer to the car and let’s see if people will break in to get our game!”. Funny thing is, they actually pushed through with it.
THQ bundled 100 copies of its new Red Faction: Guerrilla game into a parked car and left it on a London street, chaining a sledge hammer nearby. PR manager Simon Watts explained the ruse: “Because Red Faction Guerrilla features the world’s most realistic destruction engine, we thought that it would make for an interesting experiment to find out how many people, going about their everyday business, would stop in a busy city street to work out some stress by smashing their way into a car to earn a copy of the brand new game.”
I wonder if they put up a sign that told people it was a gimmick and that they were free to smash the car as a stress reliever and get a game to boot.
Captain N: The cartoon that bred Ninten-dards
During the 1980’s, an entire generation was brought up by the Saturday morning cartoon ritual. Nintendo, in a stroke of genius, released a 34 episode cartoon called Captain N. The show was about a nerdy but looks like a jock pre-pubescent kid who gets warped into the video game world.
The show features characters from various Nintendo games like Megaman, Simon Belmont from Castlevania, Kid Icarus and others. Throughout the show, Captain N and his friends would battle against evil bosses of the different video games using a light gun (Duck Hunt Peripheral) and his trusted NES controller belt.
For the whole duration of the series, I can only imagine the effect the show had on Nintendo’s sales. To get a good idea, it would be worth noting that at the time the show was cancelled, Nintendo released the SNES and we all know how well that console did at that time.
Sony’s Sacrificial Goat to the God of War
Athens, Greece. Amidst topless women feeding grapes to invited press lay a severed goat’s head as a conversation piece. Bad rep exploded on Sony’s face on this clever and (in my opinion) well played gimmick, but hey, they weren’t marketing to the media, the gamers loved it and they showed this buy buying the game.
This is one good example that even bad publicity is still publicity.
Best-Buy’s Resident Evil Zombie Gauntlet
This is by far the best marketing gimmick I’ve heard about for a game. Best-Buy Dressed up their stores, got some actors dressed up as Zombies to scare people going in, and even had real Army outside recruiting people.
The event was so good that people who went to the event out of curiosity ended up buying the game!
Best thing about this is, I heard that the idea came from a part-time employee!
know of more memorable video game marketing gimmicks? leave a comment and i’ll add them here!
