This week’s entry: Advergames
What it’s about: Commercials you can play! Since the advent of video games, companies have skipped right past product placement and instead put out games whose sole aim was to push sugar water, breakfast cereal, and even dog food on the impressionable gaming public.
Biggest controversy: Wikipedia cites “ethical and legal concerns around advergames,” starting with the fact that they’re aimed at children young enough to not know they’re being pitched to. There was widespread concern that games pushing junk food were contributing to the obesity epidemic, though those pushing healthy food could also positively influence kids.
There is also truth-in-advertising issues—Gatorade was fined $300,000 for the free mobile game Bolt!, in which Usain Bolt advises players to “keep your performance high by avoiding water,” implying that only Gatorade has what plants (and gamers) crave. Wikipedia asserts that “Gatorade had been shown to be more harmful to the human body than water,” weirdly implying that water is also harmful, just less so.
Strangest fact: There’s apparently a Pepsi-themed superhero who had his own video game. Pepsiman appeared in several commercials in Japan in the mid-’90s, before making the leap to PlayStation, with the Japan-only Pepsiman game. Pepsiman travels to real-life locations San Francisco, New York, Texas, and Pepsi City, saving dehydrated people by giving them Pepsi and occasionally riding a skateboard. In between levels, players are rewarded by a video of a man drinking Pepsi, “as they were cheap to produce.” Complex deemed it “not a bad game,” as long as the player has a high tolerance for Pepsi branding.
Thing we were happiest to learn: The first advergame is still one of the best. When arcade games were first gaining popularity, Budweiser released the relatively subtle advergame Tapper in 1983, in which you play a bartender who slings pitchers of Bud to increasingly demanding customers. The game was popular enough (and worked independently enough of its advertising message) that it was rebranded Root Beer Tapper for the younger-skewing video arcade market.
The only other advergame in Tapper’s league is Chex Quest, which Wikipedia praises as “one of the few advergames that was enjoyable to play.” Although the reason is obvious, Chex Quest is simply the already-popular game DOOM, re-skinned with a hero who shoots cereal at cartoonier (and less gory) enemies.
While there’s no indication as to whether Sneak King is any good, the Burger King-themed Xbox 360 game sold between 2.7 and 3.2 million copies in 2006. (The game was “available through meal purchase” alongside similarly burger-themed PocketBike Racer and Big Bumpin’, so it’s not clear whether the game was sold or given away.)
Thing we were unhappiest to learn: Advergames are one of the only things Wikipedia doesn’t have a comprehensive list of. The games mentioned in this article are among the only ones mentioned in the Wiki article, which means readers can’t easily discover the joys of Atari 2600 greats like Kool-Aid Man and Chase The Chuck Wagon (based on the dog food commercial); NES’ 7-Up-themed Cool Spot; or more modern games like Doritos VR Battle or Dikembe Mutombo’s 4 1/2 Weeks To Save The World, a surreal 2012 game in which the former NBA All-Star and his friend Science The Bear have to extend the Mayan Calendar to stop the world from ending, which was somehow also an extended commercial for Old Spice. Sometimes the world is a place of astonishing beauty.
Also noteworthy: Sometimes these games backfire. In 2004, Intel released the thrill-a-minute Intel IT Manager Game, which let you simulate running an I.T. department, complete with hiring. But in a feature that was both horribly sexist and depressingly accurate, the game only allowed you to hire male candidates. After the expected backlash, the game was taken off the market and redesigned. And we can’t prove that 2002 military recruitment game America’s Army is responsible for the disastrous aftermath of the Iraq War and the rise of ISIS, but we can’t completely discount it either.
Best link to elsewhere on Wikipedia: Tapper was the first advergame, but it wasn’t the first attempt. In 1978, Ralph Lauren commissioned an Atari game about polo (the sport) to promote Polo (the cologne), but it never made it to market. It was created by Carol Shaw, who was both one of the first female game designers and computer programmers. She was hired by Atari straight out of her master’s program as a software engineer, moving on from Polo to create early Atari 2600 standards 3D Tic-Tac-Toe and Video Checkers, and to co-create Othello and Super Breakout. After leaving Atari for a stint as an assembly language programmer, she rejoined the gaming world, creating River Raid, a huge hit for Activision, following it up with Happy Trails for Intellivision. She was able to retire in 1990 at age 35, largely on the money she earned from River Raid.
Further down the Wormhole: Shaw’s Super Breakout was an update of 1976’s Breakout, one of the earliest and simplest home-console video games. We usually jump a few pages ahead, but the story of how a simple block-breaking game changed the course of human history was too good to pass up. We’ll take a look at the Atari 2600’s most inadvertently influential game next week.
82 Comments
Somewhat relevant to the recent news about Domino’s bringing back The Noid mascot, there was an Avoid the Noid game for PC. Would not recommend.
Would you suggest we…avoid it?
However, there was also Yo! Noid for the NES, which is actually a pretty great (if difficult) game. Its good because they just took an existing game, Kamen no Ninja Hanamaru, and changed the art and and text to change it to a Noid-branded game. I used to play the hell out of it as a little kid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo!_NoidThe Cool Spot game mentioned in the article was also pretty good, as it was from the era of beautifully animated David Perry Genesis games alongside Aladdin and Earthworm Jim.And I am just remembering I had a Chester Cheetah game for SNES that was NOT good, and going down my own wiki-wormhole I have found this bizarre review which reads as entirely meh-to-negative, but then gives the game a score of 82%! I guess score inflation has always been around in game reviews:https://archive.org/details/Electronic-Games-1993-01/page/n69/mode/2up?view=theater
And NES! Also, the Noid is coming back to video games as Domino’s has revived the Noid.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo!_Noid
Wikipedia asserts that “Gatorade had been shown to be more harmful to the human body than water,” weirdly implying that water is also harmful, just less so.You always have to bear in mind that Wikipedia is written by whoever wandered by and started typing.In this case, those sentences are part of a clumsy summary of the article at [9]: Gatorade To Pay California $300K Over Anti-Water Usain Bolt ‘Advergame’ https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/09/21/gatorade-pay-california-water-usain-bolt-advergame/ .
And, to be fair, water can kill people.
Also, water IS poisonous. You have to drink quite a lot of it to have any adverse effects, but it can absolutely be harmful.
The dose, as always, makes the poison.
Hyponatremia (too little salt) sickens and kills athletes who drink too much water trying to stay hydrated.
It’s also true that Gatorade is not a great choice when exercising a lot. It’s almost always harmless, since most people don’t really exercise hard enough for it to matter if you’re drinking water, Gatorade, beet soup or Brawndo. But when you are hitting a point of true dehydration, Gatorade is not a good choice.
Many people and athletes have been conned into believing the human body has an extremely narrow tolerance for lower amounts of fluid and varying degrees of salts in our system, as if we were delicate newly hatched tadpoles or something. In fact, humans evolved to exercise for hours without drinking in semi-arid conditions. The typical office worker (or 5K runner) doesn’t need to drink nearly as much as they do.
Unless you’re talking about the happy hour specials at TG O’Friendly’s Pub. Ah, TG O’Friendly’s, the happiest pub in the tri-state area, home of the Neverending Pop Chow and 2 for 1 Vodkatini Tuesdays. In that case, we’re neverending thirst machines!
All my life I’ve known weirdos who drink gatorade throughout the day for no actual reason. You’re standing at a cash register, Bob. Water will do.
Once, when I was taking my daughter to an amusement park on a family road trip, and feeling shaky recovering from a nasty bout of stomach flu, I made the choice of Powerade for a walking around beverage — nothing carbonated seemed palatable, and I was really feeling an “electrolyte” deficit. I haven’t developed an ongoing taste for it, but I do retain a certain “comfort food” fondness.
Gatorade is Kool-Aid for gullible adults.
I’m pretty sure #neverendingthirstmachine is just pictures of Tom Hardy giving people big hugs.
Related, tangentially, to the whole video-games-article-thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDND#”Hold_Your_Wee_for_a_Wii”_contest
My friend, let me educate you about the terrible health risks of dihydrogen monoxide…https://www.dhmo.org/facts.htmlIt might just save your life.
This is why I only drink beer
I hate how Chex Quest is always mentioned as a good example of an advertgame. Cool Spot and McKids were at LEAST as good, and they were more than just reskins of existing games.
If you’ve never seen it SGDQ 2016 theboyks runs Pepsiman, it may be the best clip from an event ever.ETA: Cool Spot is a banger 90’s platformer.
It’s pretty damn hilarious. The best parts are the FMV sequences that are so weird and bad you wonder how that’s supposed to help sell more Pepsi.
River Raid is one of the best Atari games ever and I’m happy to hear Carol Shaw got to live well off of it.
I played the shit out of River Raid back in the day. And I also ruined at least 3 joysticks playing Decathlon.
If you did compile a comprehensive list of advert games, you’d probably need to include every film license ever. I suppose at some point the line is quite blurry.
There actually is a list of movie tie-in games (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_based_on_films), but I think you can make a clear distinction for games advertising consumer products and not films, if someone out there wants to compile that list.
Nice.
“In between levels, players are rewarded by a video of a man drinking Pepsi, “as they were cheap to produce.”
You’re really down playing how amazing these clips are.
This is missing my absolutely favorite example of an ad game ever made: Darkened Skye.To those who don’t know it, Darkened Skye is a fantasy action RPG about a girl saving the world by collecting the source of all magic: Skittles.Yup, literally Skittles. A producer at Simon & Schuster was basically told to make a Skittles video game because M&M’s had theirs and they sold well. She didn’t want to do it at all and hoped she’d get fired or sth, but she ended up going to a bar, got wasted and figured “ok, fuck it, let’s do a parody video game about Skittles”.Apparently, the Mars company was pretty chill with the idea and gave very few notes on the game until closer to release, where they were so horrified that they almost cancelled it.
You forgot to mention the weirdest part: the game and packaging hardly references Skittles. There is no Skittles on the game packaging, and the Skittles are barely visible in the game. It’s the opposite of Pepsiman, which beats you over the head with Pepsi ads.
I am a proud owner of this game for the GameCube.
what was the M&M game called?
Haha oh man, thanks for drudging up Darkened Skye! I remember the review team in EGM just being completely baffled by it way-back-when.
Rush 2: Extreme Racing USA and Mountain Dew
There’s also : “KP Skips Clumsy Colin Action Biker”https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_BikerWhich was a tie in to adverts for a prawn flavoured snack.( which are surprisingly tasty, and still around today). It was released in the UK/Ireland for 8 bit computers in the mid 80s.
You left out another breakfast-named advergame: Breakfast Brawl. It was also fairly enjoyable, since it was a Punch Out clone:
…did that breakfast sandwich soil itself when it went down?
I didn’t know that existed! Now I want to play it!
https://www.box10.com/breakfast-brawl.html
Looks fun.
In the UK we had Pushover, about an ant knocking over dominos in a certain order so as to get his hands on a pack of Quavers (cheese snacks). It was a perfectly adequate platformer.
That was actually released over here in North America for the SNES, but all of the Quavers stuff was changed/removed.
Pepsiman, the video game for people who wanted a video game about Coca-Cola but settled for a Pepsi one instead.
Cokeman would have a different connotation.
So, Vice City?
Cokeman is famous for its ‘think you’re invincible but you’re actually not’ powerup.
You mean the powder-up.
Also, it’s got the longest, most boring cutscenes ever. You can’t skip them and they’re mostly some sweaty-looking guy telling you about how much he loves windsurfing over and over and over again.
Also, he says weird shit like “Pepsi for TV Game!”
If a game was made today, it would have a scene containing the following exchange:“Sorry, we don’t serve Coca-Cola. Is Pepsi okay?”“WTF? Hell no!”[Opening text crawl] “It is a period of galactic civil war. Rebel forces, striking from a secret hidden base…”
There are no advergames. There is only (the pretty terrific) Zool.
I had Zool 2 for my Atari Jaguar! And I guess I must have played the first one also, cuz I remember even as a kid wondering about the random-ass Chupa Chups product placement.
I had a Zool T-Shirt!
Wow, I thought “I had Zool 2 for my Atari Jaguar!” would be the most obscure statement here, but I didn’t even know a Zool t-shirt existed.
It seems there were several! Pretty sure this was the one I had:
Came here to post this. Zool and Cool Spot will forever be forgiven for being advergames.
The laundromat I used to go to up until a few years ago had a Tapper cabinet and an Elvira Party Monsters pinball machine. I had the 2nd highest tapper score for over a year.
It’s interesting to me that I remember Tapper from ‘80s arcades, but had no recollection of the Budweiser marketing until it was mentioned here — I guess that’s a fail on their part?
The actual cabinet only has the Budweiser logo on the sides and it’s pretty small. I’m sure the actual cabinet design also changed a few times. The logo is also pretty big on the back wall of the first level. The root beer tapper version removed it.
And, of course, one might not see the sides of a machine at all, depending on how the arcade is arranged. But the appearance in the game raises the question of diminishing returns in advertising placement. At some point “brand awareness” turns into brand ubiquitousness, and then fades into brand invisibility.
Tapper is hard! I’ve played it a couple times at a barcade in my city and it gets challenging pretty quickly.
The American Table Tennis Association actually sponsored the first Advergame, but they dropped their connection when distributors insisted on shortening the name “It’s Table Tennis, Damnit, Not Ping Pong” to just Pong.
I had Yo! Noid on NES. The 8 year old me liked it.
All still probably better than the Atari ET game or the Nintendo Friday the 13th game
Ft13 on NES was one of the best licensed games outside of the Disney Afternoon games done by Capcom. It was legit scary, made you get all of your characters prepped and really made damned good use of Jason’s abilities.It wasn’t nearly as hard as TMNT 1 (NES) past the dam level. It just required you to play every screen as if you ran the chance of Jason showing up and to be ready to repel him and to get your characters geared out and never -ever- letting him go after the campers for too long.
Pepsiman rules.Pepsi for TV Game.
♪ Pepsimaaaaaaaaan ♪
‘…, which was somehow also an extended commercial for Old Spice.’ Thanks Mike, just used the last of the kitchen roll mopping up the tea I spilt / coughed up….
Does that pirate in Monkey Island that won’t shut up about Loom™ count as well?
Yeah, I dunno man. I know it’s strange, but I wish we had more of this today. Just not a complete invasion, though.I’d be down for a Pizza Hut-branded Crazy Taxi ripoff game, for starters.
Still disappointed the Simpsons Crazy Taxi ripoff got pulled from the market before I got a chance to play it!
Why do you think we’d need more of them? Are they fun to play?
Two points about chex quest (a really decent game1. It’s a bit unfair to call it reskinned or cloned- a total conversion mod would be more akin to PUBG or DayZ today in terms of what they were trying to do.2. Since the game was a prize (like a kinder egg or cracker Jack’s) I’m not sure it’s really an advertisement? Although I did buy some chex this week, so I guess they got me.Also funny they partnered with AOL to print the actual disks
Cool Spot is one of my favourite games; obviously nostalgia is a large part of that, but I think it’s also a perfectly good platformer in its own right. Here in the UK (and I’m guessing the rest of Europe?) the adverts with the character weren’t played on TV, and we knew Fido Dido as the 7Up mascot, so our version replaced all the 7Up bottles with generic bottles.
In the US, Fido Dido was the Slice mascot. Weird!
Brandon Bird
While there’s no indication as to whether Sneak King is any good, the Burger King-themed Xbox 360 game sold between 2.7 and 3.2 million copies in 2006. That’s entirely understandable. I’ve earned achievements in that game, and I’m still not sure whether the stealth food delivery (with a flourish) game is any good.
Dikembe Mutombo’s 4 1/2 Weeks To Save The World, a surreal 2012 game in which the former NBA All-Star and his friend Science The Bear have to extend the Mayan Calendar to stop the world from ending, which was somehow also an extended commercial for Old Spice. And it fucking RULED.
Wait, is there a decent Polo simulator out there? Was Ralph Lauren’s failure the only attempt? Why I can’t I just google this? Mysteries abound.
Wouldn’t a bunch of NES games fall under this category? I would think Yo! Noid and McKids were really nothing but playable ads for Dominos and McDonalds. California Raisins had a probably shitty now, but awesome then platformer for the PC that i remember playing.
Some months ago I played Island Saver, a FPS where you have to save some islands from an invasion of junk, as well as to save the money you are given for doing this task. It’s from the bank NatWest. I played it for free on PS4, but it’s been launched on almost every platform.I have to say that I enjoyed it and finished it in one or two days with all its basic achievements (I’m not going to pay for the DLC). It’s oriented for children, so it’s very easy, and it teaches them some concepts about recycling and saving money (loans, interests and such).
The gaming industry has great advertising potential. Just read this article to realize how big these numbers are: https://gamerseo.com/blog/social-networking-for-gamers-level-up-your-marketing-game/
I did not know Tapper was a Budweiser ad. I sucked at that game, but it was fun.