Publicity Stunts

You’ll be hearing a lot about Acclaim Entertainment on this list. The PR firm they used in the UK was responsible for several memorable campaigns that were specifically designed to bait the media. Their budgets were limited, so they generated buzz by tricking the press into talking about their ridiculous stunts. In doing so, the media was effectively creating free word-of-mouth advertising for Acclaim’s upcoming games. To promote the release of Turok: Evolution in 2002, Acclaim offered $10,000 to expecting parents who would be willing to name their newborn children after the eponymous dinosaur-hunting hero. Earlier that year, they paid 500 British pounds (and an Xbox) to five men who agreed to legally change their name to Turok for a year. That’s a pretty small price to pay for national news coverage. Nearly a decade later, Bethesda offered free games for life to anyone willing to promote Skyrim by naming their child Dovahkiin. Sadly, someone actually took them up on the offer.

Homefront is a first-person shooter set in an alternate future where a unified Korea under Kim Jong-un has occupied the Western United States. To promote the game, THQ decided to release ten thousand red balloons in San Francisco during the 2011 Game Developer’s Conference. The balloons were an apparent metaphor for communism, but they didn’t have any logos on them and most of the people who saw them had no idea what they were supposed to represent. THQ expected the balloons to rise high enough into the atmosphere to break up into tiny pieces, but weather conditions caused many of them to end up in San Francisco Bay. THQ insisted that the “soy-based, biodegradable balloons” were not harmful, but environmental groups expressed their concerns and Bay Area water control officials described the balloons as “a hazard to birds and aquatic life.” In the end, THQ was slapped with a $7,000 fine. A billboard advertisement in San Francisco can cost over $50,000 a month, so the $7,000 penalty was a small price to pay for a stunt that’s still being talked about a decade later.

Sküljagger: Revolt of the Westicans was a typical action game that was released on the SNES in 1992. It didn’t break any sales records and the reviews weren’t exactly spectacular, but it deserves credit for trying to grow beyond the confines of the gaming medium. The game came bundled with an 80-page illustrated story book, for example, and the publishers also launched a hotline that allowed you to hear from Sküljagger himself. The tyrannical pirate would frequently insult players in the game, so someone had the bright idea of extending this into the real world. After calling the 1-800 number, Sküljagger would unleash a bevy of merciless insults. There were only a handful of pre-recorded monologues and the production values were non-existent, but I was always amazed that such a hotline existed in the first place. As far as I knew, hotlines were for talking to Nintendo Power counselors or for hooking up with hot young singles in my area. It boggles my mind that a video game publisher set up a hotline just to play pre-recorded insults from a fictional pirate captain. The hotline was toll-free and it was open 24 hours a day, which was great news for kids who wanted to be insulted at 2:00 AM. Players could fire back at Sküljagger by mailing in their best written insults, and I can’t even imagine what kind of responses they received. In 20 years, some politician is going to be taken down after it’s revealed that they called Sküljagger the n-word in 1992.

Shadow Man was successful enough to warrant a sequel, but the follow-up didn’t have a lot going for it. It was met with middling review scores, and it was scheduled for release the same week as Metal Gear Solid 2. Acclaim Entertainment knew they had to do something big to promote the game’s UK launch, so their PR firm hatched a plan to affix small billboards on actual gravestones. Shadow Man: 2econd Coming was a dark game that dealt with the afterlife, so the graveyard angle was thematically appropriate. It wasn’t socially or morally appropriate, however, and the idea was met with disgust. By suggesting that “poorer families might be especially interested” in the promotion, Acclaim came across as insensitive and downright exploitative. The company argued that the promotion could help offset funeral costs, but the Church of England refused to allow any of its graveyards to be used in such a manner. It was doubtful that Acclaim would have been granted permission from the appropriate advertising authorities in the first place, but they managed to garner a ton of publicity without desecrating a single gravestone.

To mark the release of God Of War II, Sony threw a party that tried to capture the spirit of their Greek-themed action game. Official UK PlayStation Magazine published photos of the event, and the showcase included topless girls who dripped grapes into guests’ mouths. This would have been enough to raise eyebrows, but the naked girls were largely ignored because the event also showcased an apparent goat sacrifice. After learning about the event, The Daily Mail ran a sensationalist story claiming that attendees were “invited to reach inside the goat’s still-warm carcass to eat offal from its stomach.” A spokesperson for Sony insisted that the journalists in attendance were actually served a traditional Greek soup, and explained that the goat was returned to the butcher at the end of the event. Sony insisted that the dead goat was “unrepresentative of the wider event,” but they did concede that certain elements of the event were of an unsuitable nature. Sony recalled 80,000 copies of their magazine from circulation and promised to learn from the occurrence. By drumming up controversy, The Daily Mail only helped raise awareness of God of War II. The daily newspaper had a much larger readership than Official UK PlayStation Magazine, so they were doing Sony a favor by talking about their upcoming game.

To mark the release of Resident Evil 5, Capcom staged an elaborate scavenger hunt across central London. Over 100 people signed up for the event, and they were tasked with retrieving artificial body parts that were hidden in secret locations. Severed limbs could be found in garbage bins and on window sills, and detached heads were strewn across the city. The body parts looked realistic and chicken livers were used for added gore, so the police were naturally contacted by horrified citizens who were unaware of Capcom’s PR stunt. (Anyone could have seen that one coming.) After the event was over, one head, two torsos, and six limbs were still unaccounted for. A spokesperson for Capcom reached out to the media and requested that the missing body parts be returned or disposed of in a responsible manner. Even if the event had gone off without a hitch, it was a half-baked idea from the very start. Resident Evil 5 revolves around zombies and violence, but I don’t recall having to retrieve body parts in the game.

Viral marketing is a business strategy that uses social networks to promote a product or service. The name refers to how information can be quickly spread from one person to another, much like a viral infection. Although viral marketing can take on many forms, it’s not easy to predict whether or not a campaign will actually catch on. In 2006, Sony’s European branch put together a fictitious fan site chronicling two teenagers who really wanted a PSP. The aforementioned teens even released a rap video where they proudly proclaimed, “All I want for Christmas is a PSP!” The kids were apparently trying to convince their parents to buy them Sony’s hot new handheld, but fans saw through the act immediately. The website was awash with leetspeek, the music video had poor production values, and the actors didn’t exactly paint Sony fans in a positive light. Nevertheless, the whole thing was too cringe-worthy to be real, so everyone knew that a soulless corporation had to be behind the whole thing. Sony eventually fessed up and pulled the plug on the fake website. You know a viral campaign is a failure when the people behind it try to erase it from the Internet.

Battleborn is a hero shooter from Gearbox Software that was released in 2016. The game failed to gain any traction and was completely steamrolled by Overwatch when it launched two weeks later. (Overwatch reached seven million users within its first week while Battleborn faded into obscurity.) Gearbox needed to do something radical to save their game, but no one was expecting their CEO to announce the creation of a subreddit that was dedicated to pornographic Battleborn images. On January 17, 2017, Randy Pitchford sent a “VERY NSFW” Tweet that linked to a newly created “BattlebornRule34” subreddit. The subreddit was only nine hours old at the time, and it only had one active user. It’s unclear how Randy became aware of the subreddit so quickly, but the prevailing theory is that he created it himself in a desperate attempt to mimic the success of Overwatch porn. Battleborn didn’t have any waifus worthy of the Rule 34 treatment, however, so the entire concept went over like a lead balloon. Even if he didn’t create the subreddit, he was still using Rule 34 porn as an advertising gimmick. Almost immediately, the subreddit was filled with posts calling Randy pathetic. The demand for Battleborn porn was nonexistent, and Randy overplayed his hand by promoting it.

To promote the 2003 release of Burnout 2 in the UK, Acclaim Entertainment offered to pay for anyone who got caught by a speed camera on October 11. The Burnout series was all about high speeds and fast cars, so the promotion made sense on the surface level. The British Department of Transportation saw it differently, however, and felt that Acclaim was “encouraging people to break the law.” An Acclaim spokesperson insisted that they were merely trying to “ease the financial pain,” but they were compelled to withdraw their offer to reimburse speedsters. The head of their PR firm has since admitted that they always planned on retracting the promotion. In other words, the entire point of the promotion was to create controversy. Nobody likes speeding tickets and it’s fair to say that traffic cops usually are a waste of police resources. That being said, speed limits exist for a reason and it would be irresponsible to disregard them completely. If Acclaim had gone through with the promotion, someone could have potentially died by driving like a jackass.

Wimbledon is the oldest and most prestigious tennis tournament in the world, and it’s watched by millions of people around the globe. It’s obviously an event that you’d want to be associated with if you were promoting a tennis video game, but Acclaim Entertainment took an unconventional approach for the 2003 launch of Virtua Tennis 2. Instead of a standard cross-promotional deal, Acclaim’s PR firm trained 20 pigeons to fly in and out of the open-air tennis arena during the event. (The concept was dubbed “billbird advertising” by the firm.) The pigeons were to be branded with Virtua Tennis 2 logos, and a special water-soluble paint would be used so as to not harm the birds. Acclaim assured everyone that the homing pigeons would not directly interfere with the competition, and they insisted that they were merely bringing awareness of the game “directly to tennis enthusiasts.” Their VP of marketing explained that the pigeons were “trained to go straight for the fans and flap their logos in front of them.” It was an obnoxious premise, but the publicity stunt worked even though no pigeons were actually released during the tournament. Legitimate news organizations picked up the story, and Acclaim even invited media to the pigeon training sessions. The stunt drew enough attention for Wimbledon officials to release their own statement insisting that they would train hawks to hunt down and kill the pigeons. Every newspaper in the UK was talking about the absurdity of the entire situation, and Virtua Tennis 2 got heaps of free publicity as a result.