I love videogame marketing departments. None of them seem to have functioning super egos. In other areas of the media, publicity campaigns are bound by outdated concepts such as civic responsibility, taste and the fear of moral backlash. For game marketers, these are just things that happen to other people.
A case in point. Yesterday THQ bundled 100 copies of its new Red Faction: Guerrilla game into a parked car and left it on a London street, chaining a sledge hammer nearby. PR manager Simon Watts explained the ruse: "Because Red Faction Guerrilla features the world's most realistic destruction engine, we thought that it would make for an interesting experiment to find out how many people, going about their everyday business, would stop in a busy city street to work out some stress by smashing their way into a car to earn a copy of the brand new game."
First of all, I want to know how they came up with this very specific concept. It can only have been concocted at the very end of a boozy Friday in some sort of exotic Soho mojito bar. But then somehow, it carried through to Monday, it carried through long enough for someone to say 'yeah, let's do it', and it still carried on, well into buying a second-hand car and a sledge hammer and physically facilitating the escapade. This shows immense grit.
I'm also interested in the moral proclivities of these passers-by apparently going about 'their everyday business'. Admittedly, I live in a small market town in Somerset, but if I passed a car filled with videogames and parked next to a convenient sledge hammer, my first instinct - and I'm really rather confident about this - would not be to smash its windows in and make off with the contents. I'm hoping there was some sort of signage involved. I'm hoping the good people of London aren't continuously scoping out parked vehicles for easily accessible consumer goods.
Whatever. The marketing people at THQ were obviously not put off by the possibility that encouraging random urban destruction might, in some small way, be misconceived as a irresponsible. Just as the marketing people at EA did not think twice about re-designing a petrol forecourt in North London to look like a South American fuel silo for Mercenaries 2. Just like Capcom wasn't at all concerned about hiding fake (but realistic looking) body parts around central London and getting people to look for them to publicise Resi 5.
The Chinese philosopher Mencius once wrote, "great is he who has not lost the heart of a child." He was right. They keep trying to turn the videogame business into a sensible paragon of consumer entertainment, but underneath it all is the giggling schoolboy cottage industry of yore. They'll never take that away. Not entirely.
I also love the fact they chained the sledge hammer up. I mean, amid all this lunacy, someone had the foresight to think, 'hang on, if we just leave the hammer there some idiot will nick it'.
