6 Viral Video Game Stunts That Were Just Sad For Everyone
It can't be easy coming up with promotional ideas for games. There's no "talk show circuit" for games like there is for movies or albums. Video games are PR nightmares being blamed for every violent or sexist act committed, and are literally responsible for taking $100 million from stupid children and giving it to Kim Kardashian. So it shouldn't surprise you that some of the stunts used to promote games are stupid, desperate, and insane. Here are six of the worst.
#6. Halo 5 And UFC Team Up To Kill All Cross-Promotion Forever
Microsoft Studios
In October of 2015, the Ultimate Fighting Championship teamed up with the game Halo 5: Guardians for a massive cross-promotional event. It wasn't a very strange idea. The UFC covers virtually every surface in sponsor logos. For instance:
Esther Lin/MMA Fighting
Training Mask says, "Ads on dick baskets are less expensive but just as noticeable as billboards or skywriting!"
Sometimes having the name of your video game plastered all over a countdown clock, a bloody floor, and a man's hot pants isn't enough. So one of their ad-wizards came up with the idea to have the fighters incorporate some video game references into their trash talk.
The poor pugilists who were given this task were Alexander Gustafsson and Daniel Cormier, two polite adult professional athletes. The point is, if you're looking for someone to sneak in an insane reference to Halo while he threatens to knock your teeth in, it'd be hard to find two worse choices. And when the two started tweeting at each other during the lead up to their fight, their Halo referencing was such clumsy and blatant product placement, it made Adam Sandler look like Bill Hicks.
Universal Pictures
"With the same affordable taste and now with less child molestation, Subway sandwiches are a hole in one!"
Brace yourself. It began with Cormier taunting Gustafsson by saying:
Daniel Cormier/Twitter
Yes, this was a real thing someone typed with their actual human fingers. And it didn't stop! He continued:
Daniel Cormier/Twitter
If you're lost, and it's okay to be since this is fucking stupid, Spartan Locke is a character from Halo 5, not a sex act used in ancient Greece. Gustafsson had no choice but to strike back with a shoe-horned Halo 5: Guardians reference of his own, subtly featuring a Halo character featured in the hit Halo home video game series.
Alexander Gustafsson/Twitter
"Bitch, I will crush you like the weight of the robust bonuses included in the Halo 5: Guardians Mountain Dew Summer Blast Bundle.
#realtalk #whatamidoing #kiiilllmeeee"
It's nearly impossible to create fake joke tweets more ludicrous than the actual tweets these men allowed to be posted on their behalf. These are two of the most successful professional athletes and dangerous warriors alive, and they are talking like cartoon enemies from a toothpaste commercial. Just listen to this terrifying trash talk from the light heavyweight contender:
Alexander Gustafsson/Twitter
The internet obviously reacted with mocking laughter. In a sport where heavily concussed men are constantly trying to come up with unique ways to describe their opponent's impending doom, it's likely no one will ever top the absurdity of this. Also: We are confident it didn't result in a single additional copy of Halo 5 being sold.
#5. Final Fantasy XIII's Louis Chocobo Bags
Square Enix
When a company like Louis Vuitton makes billions of dollars a year in profit, you'd think they could hire the best models, right? Or at least models that exist with real physical bodies? No, for their 2016 spring line-up, they hired computer-generated characters from Final Fantasy XIII as models. Which isn't even a very good video game. In fact, it's the worst-reviewed Final Fantasy game of the series and, one might argue, the double-worst place to recruit handbag models.
Square Enix
"Heal! HEAL! FIREBALL! Sir, whatever this object is, it seems broken."
This is Claire Farron, better known by her protagonist/stripper name of Lightning. She was the lead character of Final Fantasy XIII and even got her own spinoff called Lightning Returns. Don't let her gentle features and pink hair fool you; Lightning is a no-nonsense badass, who would probably see a clutch handbag as nothing more than a way to safely transport the genitals of a slain adamantoise to the nearest genital alchemist. Even in the ad, she seems to have no idea what they're for. She flips around and brandishes the purses like a programming bug accidentally replaced her sword.
Square Enix
The most feared item in the game: ... bag?
According to the official website of the campaign, Lightning "pushes the idea of the heroine even further." Because nothing says "heroine" like a dead-eyed sex doll cartoon threatening invisible enemies with a four-thousand-dollar handbag. What story are they trying to tell here? That style is an empty, deranged illusion for people living within several layers of pointless abstraction? That's a risky message for a company bundling $12 of parts and labor with $3,988 of empty, deranged illusion. And it's also just dull. Why not give her a nice Cactuar or Rangda to fight?
Square Enix
"You can't put a Rangda in the ad? We Rangdas are, like, 60 percent handbag already!
Remember us from Final Fantasy XIII?! You know ... Rangdas!"
The weirdest part of the campaign had to be the "interview" that Lightning gave to the UK paper, the Telegraph. Due to the problem of her not existing, some poor journalist had to pretend to be talking to a character from a game she'd clearly never played about the great honor fictional characters feel when hired as real-world fashion models. It was all just impossibly nuts, like it was a dry run for one of Skynet's wackier infiltration schemes.
#4. Call of Duty: Black Ops III Starts A Fake War
Activision
It's hard to keep marketing ideas fresh for a game that releases a slightly different sequel every six minutes, but the Call of Duty series has managed to be one of the top-selling franchises thanks to an aggressive advertising campaign. Maybe too aggressive. Actually, now that we think about it, certainly too aggressive.
In September 2015, the Call of Duty Twitter page underwent a complete overhaul to remove all mentions of the video game and disguise itself as a legitimate news source called the "Current Events Aggregate." Are you confused? So were the people suddenly reading about devastating terror attacks in Singapore.
Call of Duty/Twitter
"Rescue dogs are searching for survivors, but you can find them now on both PS4 and Xbox One!"
For four hours, they tweeted news and images from the city being attacked. Virtual lives were lost, virtual riot police were dispatched, and virtually all Twitter users agreed it wasn't very cute. The final tweet at 10:37 p.m. said "This was a glimpse into the future fiction of #BlackOps3" but it may as well have said "LOL JK. Shout out to all the real terror attacks and riots going on! #DoritosFlavorWar"
This edgy and extreme marketing was, naturally, met with accusations of distaste. Even the people who made the game, Treyarch, thought it was in terrible taste, and they disavowed it and apologized almost immediately. It was all so badly received, the Call of Duty Twitter page deleted the entire campaign. To make matters worse, even in this era of rampantly unchecked facts, everyone's first reaction was "this is irresponsible" not "this is real." When your PR campaign creates a fake terror attack that doesn't even trick FOX News, you've failed in two different ways.