Ian Bogost on Advertising in Games

Ok, so a billboard in a driving game may make sense — but what about games where it doesn't make sense? As Ian Bogost points out, "Would an orc order pizza? Does a dystopian planet from the future need a pacer drink?":

This untapped potential of games upsets the very foundation of advertising as we know it. Instead of surrounding us with images that reflect lives unlived, games can allow us to try out hypothetical lives with new products, people and ideas. To realise this potential, advertisers of both goods and viewpoints must stop blindly inserting their billboards into games or creating feeble copies of the cornerstones of videogame pop culture. Instead, they must start simulating the products, public policy positions, charitable interventions and other worldly ideas in new games - games worthy of our attention.

I'm not sure I want to see advergames all over the place, but if we have to put up with in-game advertising, a little more sophistication would be welcomed.

Advertisers have yet to unlock the power of play [The Guardian]

I'll admit up front that this one is not exactly an advergame, but it's close enough for Internet work.

In 1983 Coca Cola commissioned Atari to create a cartridge for the company's annual sales convention. The result was Pepsi Invaders, a Space Invaders variant in which the aliens were replaced by letters spelling out PEPSI. The production run was 125, one for each of the attendees of Coke's sales convention that year. Sales executives also received an Atari 2600 console along with the game. The assumption must have been that shooting down Pepsi at night might inspire more fervent sales efforts during the day.

Here's another example of weird early advergames from my collection. These aren't rare like the last ones I mentioned, but they offer an interesting historical case for other reasons.

Remember the Kool-Aid Man character and ad campaign from the 70s and 80s? Oh, Yeeeaaahh. By the early 80s, General Foods had started spreading the character beyond their own advertising, first into comic books. In 1983, Mattel's M-Network software division created videogame versions of Kool-Aid Man for the Atari 2600 and Intellivision. This was a more complex process than the Johnson & Johnson and Purina games I mentioned earlier.

Time for more weird early advergames. During the research for my last book, I tried to find the first example of a branded videogame. Early games based on films, like Shark Jaws, aren't what I was looking for here. We can think of film licenses as brand extensions, not really as advertisements. What I wanted was a consumer product rather than an entertainment property.

As far as I can tell, the earliest such game is Datsun 280 Zzzap, a coin-op game from 1976. Midway had previously released the game as Midnite Racer, which was essentially the same as Atari's Night Driver, the original first-person racing game. There are no graphics in either game, just the black, black night and reflective signs to show the edges of the road. But the cabinet art and labeling for Datsun 280 Zzzap featured the name of the vehicle, and in some cases an image of the car. I count this as the first intersection of advertising and videogames.

280 Zzzap [Killer List of Video Games]

It's time for more weird stuff from my personal collection. One of the things that has interested me, both in my research and my design work, is advertising games (three chapters of my recent book Persuasive Games are devoted to it). We may think that advertising in games is as new as the web, or dynamic in-game ads, but it goes back much further than that.

The games depicted above aren't the first advergames (more on that another day), but they are among my favorites. They are Chase the Chuckwagon, created for Purina, and Tooth Protectors, for Johnson & Johnson.