games

There was a good fifteen-ish years staring in the mid 90s where game advertising had to be very confrontational or gross for some reason. That feels like a very era defining thing. Like I remember the Hitman ad showing a dead woman in a bathtub, or the Gamecube Wavebird controller that had a guy playing on the toilet. And of course everyone remembers being made John Romero's bitch.

Acclaim was notorious for this kinda thing, like they had a campaign for Shadowman 2 where they offered to pay the funeral costs of anyone who put an ad on their tombstone.

Or just anything involved with the campaign for the Dante's Inferno game. Part of it involved hiring actors to portray Christian protestors to call the game sacrilegious. Then EA sent boxes to game critics like Yahtzee. When opened the boxes would play that Rick Astley song and wouldn't stop until destroyed with a hammer. Like who tf was hired to think of all of this stuff and why did game companies pay marketers to do this