I didn’t have a big problem with the Middle Finger ad. It’s a gag, big deal. Of course I don’t buy those types of games anyway, so I’m rather indifferent to it all.
It beats the ad (Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 I think) featuring a bunch of people with soiled pants…
Best ad ever? Dunno. Some of the NWN ads were pretty good – with the “unlimited adventures” tagline and the neat painting of lots of different things going on, dragons and warriors and landscapes etc. It caught some of the sense of “infinite potential” that got me into RPG’s in the first place.
I was rather amused by a Darkstone ad that ran, “To those of you married to Diablo, meet your new mistress.” Talk about biting the bullet and embracing one’s clonedom. (Though Darkstone didn’t really feel that much like a Diablo clone to me.)
I’m also very fond of an old ad for Ultima III which simply featured a picture of the cover painting, and a bunch of quotes from various reviews. An excerpt from one quote was written in large font describing the game as “A Living Tapestry.” That’s always stuck with me.
Erm. Is that a face-hugger that has clamped itself over her vaginal area?[/quote]
Good lord, she’s hung like a…well, I don’t know what that is…hm, some kind of aquatic alien?
I’ll say this, those shells don’t bode well for any Piers Anthonyesque nymph shenanigans.
Edit: Guess what magazine that ad ran in. That’s right: Maxim.
I guess I missed the Emperor ad. That’s what I get for cancelling all my print mag subscriptions I guess…
However, I am finding the actual game Emperor pretty fun, especially in compare & contrast mode to SC4. It’s more of the same, I admit, but hey, I still enjoy that same…
That image was originally created for the March 2000 cover of CGM. We were working on it around Christmas, so time was an issue, and they sent me colorized sketches of her to see if we liked the composition, etc. If we approved it, they’d render the image.
I suspected it wouldn’t even be particularly great CG (like some of the Cate Archer renders, which look pretty fab), so I asked them why they were going to render it. Particularly with a fantasy image, I preferred the hand drawn look. And Chris Taylor was like, “You know what, I like it this way too.” So they ditched the CG and cleaned up the drawing.
And that became the main image of the game. So despite not having actually drawn it, I’d like to take full credit the final image, the marketing, and the sales success. But I don’t want to take any credit for the parts of the game that people didn’t like; they’re all GPG’s fault.
Lol! Well, whether it was a happy accident or understated brilliance or what, I don’t take back what I said. I think that that image literally sold thousands of copies of that game to people who would have otherwise given it a bye. So Chris owes you :)
Oh, and btw. How come we only got two spell slots? :D
I think that that image literally sold thousands of copies of that game to people who would have otherwise given it a bye.
Do you really think it was that good? Most comments that I heard from people were, “what’s up with sketch of the red-haired chick?” We assumed that it was some a lead-artist’s pet project because we couldn’t figure out why else it would have been chosen (ie it wasn’t a choice, it was foisted).
I think it’s an ok drawing, but pretty bland, so it definitely didn’t draw me to the game or inspire me to buy it.
Flipping through the Feb issue of CGW, there’s not a single ad (with the exception of Hegemonia, of course :wink: ) that I find compelling.
I liked the recent Age of Mythology campaign, but then again, I love the game (up until 3 a.m. playing again last night!).
I thought the recent ads for MoH: Spearhead were pretty good from a marketing standpoint. But then again, EA can afford to buy a page and leave it almost totally blank.
I also think Strategy First hit on it with the campaign for Robin Hood. Robin staring down the shaft of his arrow… looking me straight in the eye… Great ad.
Ground Control had a great ad. The Squad of Marines walking through the swamp was awesome. Too bad there weren’t any swamps in the game, but the Marine squad could kick serious ass with the Anti-tank special weapon. Also, there were a few forest covered craters that only the foot soldiers coudl climb down into. Made for great guerilla tactics.
I’m trying to think of some ads from the good old days, but memory is hazy. I recall some withering Intellivision game ads that compared their screenshots to the Atari 2600. And I remember an Infocom ad circa 1985 that began “And now for something incompletely different,” explaining that their games were “incomplete” without the essential ingredient of the player. I thought they overdid the Britishness of it (just 'cause they did a Hitchhiker game, they think they can go around paraphrasing Python taglines?) but here it is almost 20 years later and I still remember the ad.
Then there was all the EA “we see farther” stuff in the mid '80s. They were pretty pretentious, but when I look back at their old ads and their old album-box games, I think they were really ahead of their time. They went out of their way to hype the designers, giving them arty photo layouts and focusing on their creativity, etc. It was one of the first times videogames were argued as a medium of personal expression, rather than just a distraction to kill a few hours and quarters.
I frankly do not play EQ, but the ads featuring the milky skinned, pony tailed poster girl with cleavage holding a ‘staff’ is pure gold. Now the image on the Strategy Guide showing a similair woman, half clothed with a steel collar around her neck w/ chain attached being held by a lizard man (IIRC) is bordering on softcore bondage.
Yeah, I do think it was that good. No ad is going to sell 100% of the people who view it. If there was a perfect ad that could do that, we’d all be in big trouble. But I think DS’s ad did exactly the job it was supposed to do. Like I said earlier, it communicated clearly all the essential information about the game in a single, simple image. It wasn’t a complicated mess of bright colors and action intended to beat the reader into submission like so many ads are these days. Instead, it said (along with the game’s logo): Dungeon. Battle. Medieval. Fantasy. Swords. Sorcery. Feminist (i.e. “gender inclusive”). Old-school. RPG. Simple. Clear. Concise.
I hadn’t really thought about the “old-school” bit until Steve mentioned the fact that it was hand-drawn art vs. a rendered image, but I think that was probably significant. Rendered images say: New. Young. Sexy. Hand-drawn images say: Old. Comfortable. Nostalgic. (Hand-drawn can also say Amateurish and Been There, Done That, but the DS ad managed to avoid that for the most part, I think.) Using a simple hand-drawn image was probably a big draw for the older crowd of moms and pops pushing their baskets past the software rack. It was warm, inviting, incandescent light to NWN’s sterile, overbright, halogen light. At the same time, it didn’t look so old-school that it completely turned off younger buyers. Yeah, the d00d crowd probably passed it by for “kick-ass NWN,” but people of all ages with a hankering for the familiar, friendly, and straightforward were drawn to DS.
Speaking of NWN, I thought their box image was horrible. A white, runic eye on a plain, black background? What the heck was that? Unless you already had some idea what the game was about, or were drawn by simple curiosity to investigate further, you’d have no idea what was inside NWN’s box. At the same time, NWN’s print ads did mix that eye with more informative artwork and text, so those who had previously seen the ads did already have a good idea what was inside the box. But DS’s strategy was better, imo, in that no one who viewed either the print ads or the box cover in isolation from the other had the slightest question or confusion about what was inside the DS box.
See, the thing is, people who don’t really understand the psychology of selling tend to believe that “cool” is what sells. It does, but only to a certain market segment. Those who cram themselves into the “cool” straitjacket thus limit their appeal and their market to basically a crowd of boys and young men. But Chris Taylor, in wanting to make an accessible game with broad appeal, was savvy and smart enough to understand that an ad or image calculated to appeal specifically to teenage boys was going to turn off middle-aged moms and dads in black socks. So he avoided that, and I believe his wisdom payed him back handsomely.
I couldn’t agree with you more. EQ is another game that has benefited greatly from a simple marketing image that almost exactly matches their game. I say “almost,” because it’s a little too heavy on the cheese, whereas the game itself doesn’t actually have any sex in it to speak of, but other than that, you couldn’t ask for a better sales image for EQ, imo.
If Sony’s going softcore now, then it’s either because a) they’re stupid, or b) they think their remaining potential customer pool is limited to teenaged boys. I can’t say which it is, but I tend to think there are still a lot of women out there who might play EQ if the message communicated to them wasn’t “Come on in. Become the sex slave of a lizard.”
