While perusing my usual video-game news sites I came across this little gem:
The Red Faction: Guerrilla team came up with a mighty creative method of advertising their new game. The game itself is all about destruction. It is a game where you are able to destroy anything you can find. If you can find it in the environment, you can find a way to break it. What better way to get this message across than to allow people to do some destroying of their own?
The team placed a vehicle in the middle of London and filled it with 100 copies of their game. Then they attached a sledgehammer to it and left.
So simple and so smart.
The plan is not get the name out by having those 100 people take their game. It’s about the word-of-mouth and coverage this is going to get afterward. Many of the people that came by didn’t even take a game. In fact there were hundreds of people who stopped to participate. They just wanted to smack a car with a sledgehammer, and who can blame them?
That first person was a brave soul. Just because a car has a sledgehammer on it does not mean you should hit it. At the same time, I guess this acts as a sort of social experiment. If you leave a sledgehammer on your car someone WILL smash it.
At the end of the day this creative social experiment/advertising stunt will get plenty of publicity. Friends will be talking about how they got a free copy of Red Faction by smashing a car and the stories will spread across the internet. I can’t think of a more appropriate or creative way to advertising a game about destruction. Bravo.
-Wes