40 years of advergeaming - retrospective of promotional video games

Projects that were developed exclusively for the promotion and advertising of a brand, especially before, could often be found on the site. Usually these are one-time projects, but there are exceptions. All this is generally called in one word - advergame. Under the cut a translation of a small retrospective of advertising games: where did they start from and where are they now. List of the coolest bonus.

Unlike expensive entertainment games, overweig games are more “weird”, so finding good and relevant examples can be difficult. My team has compiled a list of almost 100 advergames - in this article I will share some of them.

Full list can be found here . It has a brief description and facts for each game, as well as a search by genre, brand, industry and so on.
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Early days

Promotional games are very old. The first female developer, Carol Shaw, worked on Adverge in 1978 - the game Polo was developed for the brand Polo and was, in fact, a sports polo. Project promotion was canceled, and it was never finished. But it has emerged twice as a prototype (in 1996 and 2002).

The first finished adverheims appeared, it seems, in 1983. One of them is Tapper , an arcade game designed for Budweiser. The player must serve customers with beer (before they get angry) and collect empty glasses (before they fall to the floor). The game was intended for sale only to bars, but was so popular that ordinary halls with arcade machines also bought it. To avoid alcohol advertising among children, the developers changed the Budweiser logo to Root Beer (Rutbier is a type of soft drink in North America).



Tapper also appears in the cartoon Wreck-It Ralph and the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die , which unequivocally speaks of the cult of the project.

Can adverheims be fun and popular?

Sometimes yes.

Chex Quest is a game released in 1996 for the Chex breakfast cereal. It was developed on the DOOM engine and inherited most of the classic FPS gameplay (but less aggressive). The game was distributed for free with boxes of breakfast cereals, which led to a large increase in sales - 42 million copies were distributed in total. The action lasted six weeks, but during this time the game had time to appear loyal fans. In the end, this led to another two sequels. Chex Quest 2 was released in 1997. Chex Quest 3 was developed by the former creators of the original game in 2008 as a fan service, but later the game was officially re-released. And in 2019 there was a video with the history of the series, where they mastered the new game.


Burger King made a few games, but Sneak King was the strangest and most successful. 2 million copies sold (for $ 3.99 apiece) made it one of the best-selling games of 2006. Critics found Sneak King average, but a kind of mechanic - you sneak up on hungry people to feed them with burgers - made the game popular.


Sneak king

Barclaycard Water Slide Extreme was released in 2009 and ranked the top free iPhone apps in 57 countries. Five years after its release, it still attracted 85,000 active players every day. By 2019, the Play Store game was downloaded 55 million times, which made it probably the most popular advergeim of all time.


Barclaycard Water Slide Extreme

Creative advertising games

Advergeym often become clones of successful games. For example, Pepsi Invaders and Chex Quest. There is also Brisksaber (clone Fruit Ninja), Tony and Friends in Kellogg's Land (clone of Super Mario Brothers), Mad Mix Game (clone of Pac-Man), Toyota Run (based on the classic Out Run 1986) - the list goes on and on. Reskiny is also a common thing - in one of the McDonald's games the character was simply replaced by another, so that the game 7 Up turned out.

But many games have a creative approach that can be appreciated for their design or style.

In the game for the Dutch company Pritt - Knutselwereld, the world is made of cardboard, rope, cotton wool and is similar to the crafts that they make in the lower grades. She is a bit like Samorost Studio Amanita Design.


Knutselwereld

Adidas ZX Runner uses only two colors on a black background. The only color fragments are tags on shoes and bracelets. The silhouette of the player is visible when he moves on the colored background elements.


Adidas zx runner

Crabs & Penguins , created by Coca-Cola in partnership with McDonald's, will be the most beautiful Adverheim on this list. You play as a crab and are trying to return the soccer ball to the penguins in the Arctic.


Crabs & penguins

America's Army is a fairly well-known game used to recruit soldiers into the US Army. Less well known is the Navy Training Exercise: Strike and Retrieve - a game designed to advance the US Navy. I could not find much information about her, but the screenshots are intriguing.


Navy Training Exercise: Strike and Retrieve

Pushover was created for Quavers and was released in 1992. This is a charming puzzle game that still exists on Steam. It is necessary to push dominoes in it, while the blocks have different properties - some fly, some jump. It is necessary to arrange them so that all fell - then the level will be passed.


Pushover

MC Kids (McDonald's, released in 1992) is another example of great game design. Although it was very similar to Super Mario Bros 3 and StarTropics, critics appreciated the new mechanics of gravity change. McDonald's was selling the game for $ 49.99 - which is expensive for this type of game.


Magnum Pleasure Hunt (released in 2011) is a unique platformer. Purpose of the game: to search for treasures all over the internet. The game world consists of real and fictional sites, in blocks of which the player runs and collects chocolates. There are also rocking, flying and driving. Magnum has collaborated with many brands, whose websites have become part of the “Internet” of the game - it’s not hard to guess that the game was not very beautiful. But the players appreciated the innovativeness - about 7 million people played in Magnum Pleasure Hunt.


Colonel Sander's Kentucky Fried Football Challenge from KFC is an unusual Instagram game like a text quest. At each stage, you need to choose a football player who will gain or lose a few yards. The selection takes you to another Instagram account, where the net represents the football field in its new state. The KFC bucket box contains a video and a description with the transition to the following stages (to the following accounts).

Bad luck

Failures occur in many forms. The most common is failure due to bad game design. That is why many adverheims are so boring. Another common point is when projects are canceled or discontinued in the later stages of development. There are many reasons for this.

Perhaps the brand's marketing manager was changed, and he kills all the projects of his predecessor. Or the developer underestimated the development time and does not have time to finish it in time. For Fido Dido , it seems that the reason is that the brand (7 Up, in this case) has changed the mascot, and the original mascot has ceased to be relevant. The game was completed around 1993 - it was not officially released, but the ROM was leaked to the network. The situation was so confusing that many considered the game officially released, and even did reviews.

Some games are really dubious: from the terrible Mojo Master for Ax (you need to use special moves to seduce women) to the disastrous game Hire Hitman on Facebook, created to promote the console game Hitman Absolution. In Hire Hitman, you could leave an “order” for a friend, point out “her terrible makeup” or worse (the game was removed a few hours after the release).


Mojo master

There are also studies that show that adverheims have a particularly strong effect on children. Children do not know that they consume advertising, and the games make them look more like a brand, and subconsciously influence their buying decisions. What becomes a problem in combination, for example, with unhealthy food. This has led to bans of advergems in some countries (for example, in the UK) along with other media that advertise specific products for young children.

The proliferation of the first flash games, and then mobile, has altered advertising games in several ways. When there are so many free-to-play projects, advergems are often free too. Monster Energy Supercross and its continuation are examples of the opposite.


Monster Energy Supercross

But at the same time, they often become “one time” games. Many companies are not trying to maintain their advergeyme, even if they reach the desired metrics. Although today you can play Tapper and other old games, many new games are lost - there are only screenshots or reviews left. And modern types of advergeym - banner games - are even more disposable.

Modern trends

As VR and AR are gaining in popularity, they offer companies additional opportunities to create a new experience selling their products.

After the success of Magnum Pleasure Hunt, which I mentioned earlier, the company made several sequels. I found five, but videos with two different Magnum games claim that they were both the second in a row. One of these was the AR-clone Pac-Man, installed on the central streets of Amsterdam. Players hunted for chocolate bones, and if they were not eaten by the haunting mouths, they would get real ice cream as a reward.

An example of VR is the rather dismal game KFC for Oculus Rift called The Hard Way (2017). A player can avoid eternity with General Saunders if he successfully cooks fried chicken.


The hard way

Nike used Reactland's impressive VR / AR platformer to launch new sneakers in Shanghai. Players take a pair of sneakers, a controller, stand on a treadmill, and run in simulated environments projected on the walls around them.


Now, when the gaming industry is one of the largest, some brands integrate games into their marketing in such a way that they go beyond the framework of advergeming. KFC, for example, launched KFC Gaming, a community development unit around games and KFC-sponsored e-sports events. Similarly, Arby's is trying to attract gamers with references to games.

Conclusion

It has been almost 40 years since the advent of advergaming. And there are no signs and reasons that he will disappear in the next 40.