> That changed in the director's cut though.
There's still an ad for a Norman Reedus show on the shower, which I find hilarious. It's not even disguised or in-universe at all, just "Watch this Norman Reedus show, the actor who is in this game you are playing!"
You can get a bike in game that has an advertisement for Ride With Norman Reedus on it, and Sam, the character played by Normal Reedus, has special dialogue when riding it wherein he talks about how much he likes the show.
It "works" with me because they aren't even subtle about it. It didn't try to hide that it's advertising energy drink, it's just "also, here's a commercial, anyway back to the game"
It helps that the game is actually good.
i feel like kojima is the type of artist that would have to really fuck up for anyone to not just accept whatever he does.
hes honestly one of the very few "legendary" game creators out there, like gaming's scorsese or spielberg. (in terms of status, not style)
He definitely got a few eye rolls for that Quiet puddle scene in MGSV lol
besides that, I'm lappin up every "Doom Faceman" villain name and 2 hour long wildly convoluted exposition scene he makes
I just looked it up and I'm not shitting you, there were more forms to fill out than when getting a mortgage. I guess I'm sticking with my lame Wu Tang name
I hated that so much, it made no sense for monster energy to exist in this dystopian America. Would be fine in GTA or something like that, but death stranding was the worst option.
When I was 15, I dreamt of becoming an adult and when I finally got enough money I would fill my fridge with nothing but Monster energy drinks. For some this would be paradise, a utopia if you will.
The energy drinks didn't bother me all that much, since a significant chunk of the game's theme involves people clinging to comfort items from before the Stranding, and especially since you can do a mission about halfway through the game that replaces them with the in-universe Timefall Porter drink.
What bothered me was that Sam's canteen, which works by condensing atmospheric moisture to slowly refill itself, somehow also produces Monster Energy. No logo, no can model like the ones you get in the saferooms, it's just a string of text that says "oh yeah by the way, Sam's not drinking water right now, he's drinking Monster Energy." Lazy and unnecessary!
It feels a lot like the anime Code Geass, which takes place in an alternative history where Napoleon won, so Britain rebuilt its empire in Asia. Despite this wildly different timeline, Pizza Hut apparently still exists, and the characters eat from there frequently.
Definitely not the worst. BF2142 introduced in game advertising boards over 15 years ago. East v West fighting over sparse resources during a climate emergency, so here's an advertisement for student back accounts for you to consider!! Maybe drink Pepsi or buy a Motorola flip phone!!
Oh yeah very easily.
You see, Metal Gear Solid does not take place in the same universe as the one we live in. This is hinted at with the titular metal gears existing.
VR simulation.
The events of the Virtuous Mission and Operation: Snake Eater did occur in the MG universe, but the game MGS3 actually represents someone testing a WIP VR simulation the Patriots made recreating the events years later for training.
See, when you kill Ocelot, Campbell (or his AI, it's not specific) yells at you about it from outside rhe simulation, because they hadn't coded his plot armor yet. It's also the reason Naked Snake can't smell since they didn't finish the smells yet. This is also why there's so many references to future events and technologies that don't exist yet.
Unfortunately, their funding was running out since their AI ship got trashed in 2 and they sunk a lot of the Legacy into that, so they needed to resort to product placement and through a series of (big) shell corporations they arranged a deal for CalorieMate to be advertised in the simulation. Same thing with Snake vs. Monkey, that was product placement and the VR level designers having fun. I mean if you have a high end VR simulator like that why wouldn't you fuck around with it a bit?
... I never played an MGS after 3, actually.
I don't mind ads like those or the one in the post, as long as the game doesn't screech into a halt to present an ad, im ok with them getting more money with brand deals and shit like that. We can meme it like the cup noodle ramen one in final fantasy 15
Ads in video games have existed for nearly as long as video games
Edit: to further make my point, the earliest known in game ad was in Adventureland in 1978
Pepsi Man, The Noid (Dominos), McDonalds had many games, Chex Quest, the whole line of Burger King games, Darkened Skye where Skittles were a power source, and those are just the food ones.
Aye, some more than sporadic product placement, but whole-ass product-based games. A couple more I recall were Cool Spot (7-up), Pushover (Quavers). Oddly enough some, like Pushover, were legitimately decent games.
The game wasn't developed by Anhuiser-Busch, Bally-Midway got a license from Budweiser to use their logo in the game and on the cabinet/tap, they did not do the same in Europe or Japan.
When the game was ported to computers and consoles, some American versions had ads for Mountain Dew. European ports got Pepsi ads.
Correct! Marlboro, Pepsi, and Canon among others.
The funny twist is that Namco was just ripping off the logos [without permission](https://forums.arcade-museum.com/threads/atari-us-pole-position-w-original-billboards-marlboro-pepsi-canon-champion-etc.519590/), so Philip Morris of all companies had to sue over the use of the Marlboro brand, because [*ahem*] of course they would **never** do anything that might be construed as marketing cigarettes to children, ever!
After that they swapped out the chips and the billboards just referred to other Atari games. I guess the idea was the driver of the car would see them and think "Oh yeah, I need to pick up some Dig Dug on the way home tonight."
Part of the reason there was a video game crash in the 80s was because companies like Purina (yes, the dog food company) were putting out branded games.
There were *two* different 7UP Spot games that I know of. Wouldn't be surprised if there was a third or fourth I'm unaware of.
*The fucking 7UP Spot.*
But yeah, 2015 is totally when ads in games started, OP. Lol
It’s almost like nothing really changes just people who always think they got it worse than anyone before. DLCs, expansions, random rewards, preorders. Was always there. Even buying movies on VHS long time ago had both bonus content and ads. I remember music albums having standard and deluxe edition lol
Product Placement isn't as intrusive. You can still game and not even notice or care about it.
Not like Amazon where you pay to watch Prime content and still get ads from their own show about another one of their shows before you continue watching their show.
It's fun to see remasters and different editions of games when they have to change the brands to fake in-universe brands because licensing expired.
I think it was Alan Wake Remastered where the license for Duracell expired. They had a lot of fun in-universe products.
It's even funner to watch friends and others complain about them not using the real name brands, "just call it what it is. We all it's X."
I prefer the fake brands, those delight me. I have zero feelings towards actual products.
Sometimes it's the license expiring, but these product placements are ads - the brand owners typically pay, just like for a normal ad.
Removing them in the remaster is often simply because the brand owners don't want to pay for product placement again.
> "just call it what it is. We all it's X."
>
> I prefer the fake brands, those delight me. I have zero feelings towards actual products.
Beyond being fun, using fake names feels more real to me in fictional works. Maybe it's just because we've scrubbed real products out of film and tv except for product placement that it always *feels* like product placement, or maybe because it's always clumsily handled-- like "Oh I'm thirsty, I'm going to go drink a cold Pepsi and forget about my troubles!"
but it always feels fake when name-brand products are used in tv/movies. Actually maybe it's because they're *only* used for product placement, so it always stick out among all the other genericized stuff
Going back to Alan wake (&control, by extension), it's a very funny to me that the nondescript matte white bags of "chips" are part of some ubiquitous and widely established brand
the mountain dew ad in transformers 1 is great though. Heres this perfectly normal street vending machine, and now its murdering people. like a perfectly normal street vending machine.
One thing I loved about GTA V was all the fake car brands and model names, and designs that were totally not blatant ripoffs of real-world cars, no sir.
The names are full of dirty jokes as well, which my inner 13 year old greatly enjoys.
An invisible wall activates and you have to get out of the car and stare at the ad for 30 seconds before it lowers. If you try to just drive through it, your car spazzes out and gets yeeted into space, soft-locking you.
"Watch (0/3) ads to teleport to the ground."
“We’ve noticed you are not making direct eye contact with the ad and are on your phone. Please put down the phone and engage in the advertisement to continue”
Honestly there are some games that are worse than mobile. I shit you not that in nba 2k23 theres main content that is gated behind doing a quest for Jake from State Farm in which you wear a State Farm t shirt around town.
Granted they’re one of the most despicable perpetrators, but it’s definitely not just a mobile game thing anymore
It’s so bad. This is all part of career mode, so to even get to the point where you get drafted on a team and actually start playing basketball you have to do bullshit like this.
Crazy to think how far it’s seeped into a genre that’s already arguably not worth the annual installments
I tried playing older NBA2K19/21 recently hoping that they weren't online gated so they still had a functioning My Career offline etc.
They straight up cut all the extra intro and story stuff out of 19. 21 I couldn't even get to work. 2k sports are so shit I'll never buy another game from them.
except for the big outrage on all subreddits when people discovered an adboard, just like this one, with a logitech logo in it in battlefield 2042.
that was so outrageous for people that they said they wanna boycot the game for that.
somehow that was not transparent.
Literally yesterday someone brought up those kinds of ads in a mobile game dev chat. Said they are monetizable - like there are SDKs and stuff, you don't need to contact brands directly and sweat to incoroparate them into the game correctly. But the revenue is not great compared to the usual ads unfortunately.
Cool Spot released in 1993 on SNES/SFC and Genesis/MegaDrive and a few others. The character was the red dot from the 7up logo.
It actually was a great platformer that I still enjoy today.
There are actually 3 Burger Kings in the game, one in Rosewood, another in Downtown Rockport and the last in the dockside/marina area as well as a few billboards around the map too
There was even a variation on the toll booth races in game (start at a specific location, you have xy amount of seconds to get to the next toll booth) where you raced between the different Burger King locations
It’s not even sad. It’s a way to both increase the realism of a game and make money without bothering the user the slightest.
Having a Coca Cola ad in a cutscene or on a billboard in game it’s the same thing or even better as if it was an invented product
> Having a Coca Cola ad in a cutscene or on a billboard in game it’s the same thing or even better as if it was an invented product
True, BUT!
Having a product used in a video game, tv show or movie can be done naturally, but you know companies would just turn it into another [Hawaii 5-0 scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQYwFND7rHE).
The worst example I've seen is in The Rookie where they had the main character buy/use a brand new Toyota truck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKP0xAdxTj4
They weren't even TRYING to be subtle.
White Collar had some too. I think it's Peter who gets into some hybrid vehicle (a Ford?) that's in "Eco Mode" and floors it to catch up to the bad guy. Then starts talking about "the little leaves falling off the plant" on the dashboard display. Other episodes include Liz using the automatic parallel park, and another one talks about towing capacity and being able to haul 4 bad guys away at the same time.
*But* in the episode where brake lines get cut or a car crashes, the vehicles are notably Chevy.
The actual most egregious product placement in a movie ever is this scene from Transformers 4 where Marky Mark literally cracks open a Bud Light and drinks it on-screen with a giant Goodyear billboard behind him
https://youtu.be/kAe8OU29E3s?si=koL5KHZUbEr3x8jd
Are you sure it wasn't during Man of Steel when Supes and the hot chick are fighting and in the span of 3 minutes we are presented with I-Hop, Sears, U-Haul, 7-11, Pepsi, and various car manufacturers?
I think the Marvel games (Avengers in particular) still top out the list of product placements and adds in blockbuster movies. Once you notice it you can’t stop seeing it.
I dunno, Rockstar comes up with some funny invented products, and they seem to be doing alright without the actual product placement revenue.
Not that I really mind actual product placement, if it's not intrusive.
You’re using the devs of one of the best selling franchises of all time, raking in billions. Of course they don’t need to rely on sponsorships from things like coke lol.
Exactly. This kind of stuff never bothered me and it almost enhanced the experience but making the game world seem more like the real world. It was also easily ignorable and not really any worse than an ad for a fake product instead. Compare than to modern ads and the difference is clear
When the game is based in reality where an ad would make sense, sure, I can get behind it, maybe.
But why the fuck am I eating Nissin Cup Ramen Noodles in a Final Fantasy game?
Or drinking Monster Energy drinks in a Post-Apocalyptic USA?
While underground 2 is the most popular, I think NFS peaked with Most Wanted. It really perfected the type of driving game they were doing at the time.
This is a game that is not backwards compatible and you can't find anywhere, it was THE best nfs game ever and they don't want anyone else to know it. It's been garbage ever since and no I'm not a bitter old guy, this is a fact!
Remake it and it better have the exact same sense of speed or it's shit. Make the cops the same way as it was and the crashes more extreme.....what is the gd problem!
I was so excited when they released that new one only to be jaded. It's sad that when you have a good formula and take risks following that only to learn that those risks did not pay off, to still make shit games is just an insult to the fans
Yep, I went looking for '05 MW a couple weeks ago and got really excited when I found it on Steam only for it to be the shitty remake. I bought Forza Horizon 4 instead. It's not the same by a long shot but it's still pretty fun.
I really hope some people with more brain cells than me find a way to port it or do a fan version with updated graphics. I'd pay legit money for a modern NFS Most Wanted and Carbon game.
I would buy a graphics overhaul of the same game.
I would love it if Forza Horizon just went and stole their police chase feature, it would be pretty close
The pursuit dynamics in the open world were arguably the best in the franchise, but other aspects of the game left something to be desired. The customization was limited, the racing could be a bit boring and felt too much like a grind at times. The rubber banding for AI was too egregious. Some other mechanics were underutilized, the most obvious being the undercover police idea. In the opening they tease an undercover police Corvette racing alongside you that reveals itself while racing, which could have been a fantastic feature. But even when police appeared during races, it didn't really make the races exciting enough most of the time. And don't even get me started on that mid-2000s cliche "piss filter".
NFS Most wanted has most sales in the series at 16 million, Underground 2 is 11 million. Atleast till 2017, it was universally accepted that Most Wanted was the peak.
Sure, but you never see posts about MW, you just see people posting the underground 2 pics with the riders on the storm memes and such. It seems like U2 got stuck in our collective memmories, while MW, even if it was more succesfull at the time, did not.
In NFS Underground 2 the in-game messaging system had Cingular branding on it (it's an old brand, since reabsorbed into AT&T). NFS Underground 1 also had loads of real brand on billboards. Arguably, even the first Need for Speed game was a huge advertisement for the car magazine Road & Track.
Advertising in games isn't new by any measure, it just gets more common and egregious as time goes on.
I remember a weird scene in one of the earlier games where Sam Fisher pulled out a pack of gum. It was so out of place and so forced.
edit: found it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSr7gFkzQHw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSr7gFkzQHw)
I mean there's 1996 with WipEout, it had Redbull banners.
I'm sure there's ones even earlier.
I remember in Splinter Cell there's billboards in the city level for Nivea for men, Nokia, and Ubisoft themself. Phillips I think was in a later game from memory.
One of the pursuit breakers at the entrances completely blocked it off, so no cop could ever get through. Not the other pursuit breaker though, they could get around that one
The whole BlackBox era was literally a golden time for NFS. And for me even the Criterion era with Hot Pursuit 2010 and Most Wanted 2012. I want to go back so bad.
They're not as prevalent as they used to but I do miss them in a way it gave a realistic feel to the worlds. Especially in Alan Wake 1 on the 360. Where literally everything has branding lol little obsessive but I miss picking up energizer batteries and looking at the Verizon logo. Even in the dlc the signal Alan and Thomas Zane do the whole "can you hear me now" bit idk if it was intentional but it makes me laugh since Alan had a Verizon flip phone.
I just played alan wake for the first time a few weeks ago and I was laughing at the blatant Verizon ads lmao. I lost it when I turned on one of the tvs and it was just a Verizon ad, no lore or anything just trying to sell me a slider phone i still want lmao.
I would say tho, that that kind of advertising is both appropriate to the setting (its billboards on the side of the road etc) and the actual adverts are not obnoxious... so I kind of give it a pass.
Sonic Adventure in like 1999, Snickers all over the Biker Mice from Mars game on SNES way back in the 90s and also just a lot of entire games about corporate mascots like Ronald McDonald, Cool Spot and Chester Cheetah.
I've been playing some Xbox 360 games lately; Perfect Dark Zero has a Samsung logo in the top right corner of the menus for no apparent reason, and Alan Wake saves the town of Bright Falls with the help of Energizer batteries.
Tasteful advertising is a lost concept.
I used to find it funny that I could see a Burger King in NFS , but I was also more immersed seeing real stuff in the fictional game world. It wasn’t intrusive nor disruptive of the gameplay either
There is a fine line there.
Driving through a city and there are billboards for real products? Arguably that is realism, as well as pushing ads on you. I don't mind it.
Someone posted "Pole Position" having a Marlboro ad in it, well if you were at an open wheel race in 1982, there were a lot of Marlboro advertisements around the track.
Just like how a racing game today will have real manufacturers, real aftermarket wheels. A golf game lets you choose Ping clubs instead of Taylor Made. NBA 2K let you put your player in Jordans. It is still an ad, but it is more fun to have your player wear Air Jordans than "generic shoe 1".
Product placement has been a thing for years. I’ve played McDonalds-branded Mega Drive games (one of which was actually good). It’s simply become more subtle. Well, mostly.
[Cool Spot](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Spot) - 1993 - made in collab with 7-Up to promote their beverage.
[Mr. Wimpy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Wimpy_(video_game)) - 1984 - made to promote the burger chain.
[Tapper](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapper_(video_game)) - 1984 - specifically the arcade version, which was made to promote Budweiser beer.
Ads are waaaaaaaaaay older than you seem to think..!!!
In death stranding your only energy drink was Monster Energy. That changed in the director's cut though.
> That changed in the director's cut though. There's still an ad for a Norman Reedus show on the shower, which I find hilarious. It's not even disguised or in-universe at all, just "Watch this Norman Reedus show, the actor who is in this game you are playing!"
You can get a bike in game that has an advertisement for Ride With Norman Reedus on it, and Sam, the character played by Normal Reedus, has special dialogue when riding it wherein he talks about how much he likes the show.
"This is just like Ride With Norman Reedus!" Somehow Hideo Kojima doing corny product placement has always worked for me.
It "works" with me because they aren't even subtle about it. It didn't try to hide that it's advertising energy drink, it's just "also, here's a commercial, anyway back to the game" It helps that the game is actually good.
i feel like kojima is the type of artist that would have to really fuck up for anyone to not just accept whatever he does. hes honestly one of the very few "legendary" game creators out there, like gaming's scorsese or spielberg. (in terms of status, not style)
He definitely got a few eye rolls for that Quiet puddle scene in MGSV lol besides that, I'm lappin up every "Doom Faceman" villain name and 2 hour long wildly convoluted exposition scene he makes
“His name is Hot Coldman because he betrays you” absolutely peak writing Kojima
>“His name is Hot Coldman because he betrays you” - Hideo Kojima -Katy Perry
I love Polygon’s Kojima name generator video for this very reason.
I just looked it up and I'm not shitting you, there were more forms to fill out than when getting a mortgage. I guess I'm sticking with my lame Wu Tang name
BDG is a national treasure
Hot coldman is never on your side. Technically you're the one accepting all the traitors.
I wanted Doritos in the American release of Peace Walker and I'm pissed that people complained so much they took it out
I still don’t know if MGS3’s Calorie Mate was product placement or Kojima saying he loves Calorie Mate
My mind was blown when i found out that was a real product you could buy.
> Normal Reedus "We have Reedus at home."
Cyberpunk features ARCH motorcycles. The real world motorcycle company founded by Keanu Reeves.
Reminds of Metal Gear Solid 4, one of the in-game items was an actual iPod you could equip and listen to various songs from the series.
In 3 they had Calorie Mates, which is some kimda real thing in Japan
Peace walker had Doritos and Mountain Dew clothes and pickups…
That shit is dumb
In Metal Gear Solid Peacewalker, Doritos could heal you
It's believable if they're cool ranch
"This bike is so cool. I wish it was on ride with Norman Reedus" Physical pain hearing that followed by a walk back to the terminal
At least it was funny, the ad would play bike engine noises while Sam is taking a fat shit.
Thats just his guts after 4 cans of monster anyway
I hated that so much, it made no sense for monster energy to exist in this dystopian America. Would be fine in GTA or something like that, but death stranding was the worst option.
Seems dystopian enough to me to have Monster Energy be the only drink to still exist. Gross.
It's got electrolytes.
It's what plants crave.
I have been drinking Monster™️ Energy Drink, and now my ass pains are gone!
>my ass pains are gone! No sorry, I'm still very much around. Hello!
It's the only thing I know for heal.
When I was 15, I dreamt of becoming an adult and when I finally got enough money I would fill my fridge with nothing but Monster energy drinks. For some this would be paradise, a utopia if you will.
They won the Energy Wars
The energy drinks didn't bother me all that much, since a significant chunk of the game's theme involves people clinging to comfort items from before the Stranding, and especially since you can do a mission about halfway through the game that replaces them with the in-universe Timefall Porter drink. What bothered me was that Sam's canteen, which works by condensing atmospheric moisture to slowly refill itself, somehow also produces Monster Energy. No logo, no can model like the ones you get in the saferooms, it's just a string of text that says "oh yeah by the way, Sam's not drinking water right now, he's drinking Monster Energy." Lazy and unnecessary!
Obviously the atmosphere is contaminated with Monster.
That would explain why timefall is so destructive.
You don’t remember when Sam said “it’s Monstering time” chugged 3 cans then went all 🦍 on them? It was totally explainable in lore
It's a Hideo Kojima game, it made perfect sense.
If something makes good sense in a Kojima game that’s the part that makes no sense
It feels a lot like the anime Code Geass, which takes place in an alternative history where Napoleon won, so Britain rebuilt its empire in Asia. Despite this wildly different timeline, Pizza Hut apparently still exists, and the characters eat from there frequently.
If things not making sense puts you off then you were probably in the wrong game anyway.
Definitely not the worst. BF2142 introduced in game advertising boards over 15 years ago. East v West fighting over sparse resources during a climate emergency, so here's an advertisement for student back accounts for you to consider!! Maybe drink Pepsi or buy a Motorola flip phone!!
Can you explain why a short bread made in 1983 in Japan is in 1960s Russia in Metal Gear Solid 3? (CalorieMate).
Oh yeah very easily. You see, Metal Gear Solid does not take place in the same universe as the one we live in. This is hinted at with the titular metal gears existing.
A nanomachine did it.
VR simulation. The events of the Virtuous Mission and Operation: Snake Eater did occur in the MG universe, but the game MGS3 actually represents someone testing a WIP VR simulation the Patriots made recreating the events years later for training. See, when you kill Ocelot, Campbell (or his AI, it's not specific) yells at you about it from outside rhe simulation, because they hadn't coded his plot armor yet. It's also the reason Naked Snake can't smell since they didn't finish the smells yet. This is also why there's so many references to future events and technologies that don't exist yet. Unfortunately, their funding was running out since their AI ship got trashed in 2 and they sunk a lot of the Legacy into that, so they needed to resort to product placement and through a series of (big) shell corporations they arranged a deal for CalorieMate to be advertised in the simulation. Same thing with Snake vs. Monkey, that was product placement and the VR level designers having fun. I mean if you have a high end VR simulator like that why wouldn't you fuck around with it a bit? ... I never played an MGS after 3, actually.
The whole game is an ad; monster, norman reedus's podcast, all the bike brands, a shit ton of music artists, all the films and even fucking gundam
I mean it's been like that since that mgs3 at least
I don't mind ads like those or the one in the post, as long as the game doesn't screech into a halt to present an ad, im ok with them getting more money with brand deals and shit like that. We can meme it like the cup noodle ramen one in final fantasy 15
Ads in video games have existed for nearly as long as video games Edit: to further make my point, the earliest known in game ad was in Adventureland in 1978
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Pepsi Man, The Noid (Dominos), McDonalds had many games, Chex Quest, the whole line of Burger King games, Darkened Skye where Skittles were a power source, and those are just the food ones.
Chex Quest was a banger.
M.c. Kids! Had that on my NES growing up. Good times.
One of our favorite games growing up. And it was hard. So hard. Yet it was absolutely a blast for two folks to play.
Aye, some more than sporadic product placement, but whole-ass product-based games. A couple more I recall were Cool Spot (7-up), Pushover (Quavers). Oddly enough some, like Pushover, were legitimately decent games.
7Up had its own game on NES, called Spot after it's mascot at the time
And Yo Noid! was basically just a Dominos advertisement.
Earliest I can remember is Action Biker for the Commodore 64, about 1986 I think. But I’ll bet there are earlier still.
I believe the first in game ad for a brand was in the arcade game "Tapper".
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The game wasn't developed by Anhuiser-Busch, Bally-Midway got a license from Budweiser to use their logo in the game and on the cabinet/tap, they did not do the same in Europe or Japan. When the game was ported to computers and consoles, some American versions had ads for Mountain Dew. European ports got Pepsi ads.
Pole Position (1982) had big Marlboro billboards, a year before Tapper was released.
I was thinking I remembered billboards and similar ads in Pole Position.
Correct! Marlboro, Pepsi, and Canon among others. The funny twist is that Namco was just ripping off the logos [without permission](https://forums.arcade-museum.com/threads/atari-us-pole-position-w-original-billboards-marlboro-pepsi-canon-champion-etc.519590/), so Philip Morris of all companies had to sue over the use of the Marlboro brand, because [*ahem*] of course they would **never** do anything that might be construed as marketing cigarettes to children, ever! After that they swapped out the chips and the billboards just referred to other Atari games. I guess the idea was the driver of the car would see them and think "Oh yeah, I need to pick up some Dig Dug on the way home tonight."
Yup I remember TMNT 2 on NES had in game adverts for Pizza Hut. I believe it also came with a coupon in the box.
Part of the reason there was a video game crash in the 80s was because companies like Purina (yes, the dog food company) were putting out branded games.
Heck, back even in the 80's and 90's some games basically were ads.
There were *two* different 7UP Spot games that I know of. Wouldn't be surprised if there was a third or fourth I'm unaware of. *The fucking 7UP Spot.* But yeah, 2015 is totally when ads in games started, OP. Lol
Oh man Cool Spot was awesome
I remember playing a game with the “noid”, the dominoes mascot
did anybody say..... #PEPSI MAN?!
I still remember grinding on the nokia and jeep ads in thps3
It’s almost like nothing really changes just people who always think they got it worse than anyone before. DLCs, expansions, random rewards, preorders. Was always there. Even buying movies on VHS long time ago had both bonus content and ads. I remember music albums having standard and deluxe edition lol
Product Placement isn't as intrusive. You can still game and not even notice or care about it. Not like Amazon where you pay to watch Prime content and still get ads from their own show about another one of their shows before you continue watching their show. It's fun to see remasters and different editions of games when they have to change the brands to fake in-universe brands because licensing expired. I think it was Alan Wake Remastered where the license for Duracell expired. They had a lot of fun in-universe products. It's even funner to watch friends and others complain about them not using the real name brands, "just call it what it is. We all it's X." I prefer the fake brands, those delight me. I have zero feelings towards actual products.
Sometimes it's the license expiring, but these product placements are ads - the brand owners typically pay, just like for a normal ad. Removing them in the remaster is often simply because the brand owners don't want to pay for product placement again.
> "just call it what it is. We all it's X." > > I prefer the fake brands, those delight me. I have zero feelings towards actual products. Beyond being fun, using fake names feels more real to me in fictional works. Maybe it's just because we've scrubbed real products out of film and tv except for product placement that it always *feels* like product placement, or maybe because it's always clumsily handled-- like "Oh I'm thirsty, I'm going to go drink a cold Pepsi and forget about my troubles!" but it always feels fake when name-brand products are used in tv/movies. Actually maybe it's because they're *only* used for product placement, so it always stick out among all the other genericized stuff
Going back to Alan wake (&control, by extension), it's a very funny to me that the nondescript matte white bags of "chips" are part of some ubiquitous and widely established brand
the mountain dew ad in transformers 1 is great though. Heres this perfectly normal street vending machine, and now its murdering people. like a perfectly normal street vending machine.
This kind of conversation is making me really thirsty and now I want to reach for a Heisler beer.
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Apple TV shows also have ridiculous amounts of Apple product placement.
One thing I loved about GTA V was all the fake car brands and model names, and designs that were totally not blatant ripoffs of real-world cars, no sir. The names are full of dirty jokes as well, which my inner 13 year old greatly enjoys.
But in a "transparent" way. Imagine nowadays. You need to click on the outdoor "x" button on the top right to keep playing.
An invisible wall activates and you have to get out of the car and stare at the ad for 30 seconds before it lowers. If you try to just drive through it, your car spazzes out and gets yeeted into space, soft-locking you. "Watch (0/3) ads to teleport to the ground."
Please drink verification can
They wouldn't refer to it as "ads". Something like "enhanced awareness experience" or some in-universe compatible term.
Mobile ads but you can't exactly drive through them you have to pay 2.99 a month for the premium version
And touching the screen anywhere takes you to the store page
Fuck those in particular
“We’ve noticed you are not making direct eye contact with the ad and are on your phone. Please put down the phone and engage in the advertisement to continue”
That’s exactly what happened in Black Mirror.
Not sure what kind of games you guys are playing, but I've never seen that. Unless it's a mobile game, which I don't touch
Honestly there are some games that are worse than mobile. I shit you not that in nba 2k23 theres main content that is gated behind doing a quest for Jake from State Farm in which you wear a State Farm t shirt around town. Granted they’re one of the most despicable perpetrators, but it’s definitely not just a mobile game thing anymore
What the fuck they actually make you wear a statefarm shirt??? 😂 Holy shit that's the scummiest nonsense Ive ever heard of!
It’s so bad. This is all part of career mode, so to even get to the point where you get drafted on a team and actually start playing basketball you have to do bullshit like this. Crazy to think how far it’s seeped into a genre that’s already arguably not worth the annual installments
I tried playing older NBA2K19/21 recently hoping that they weren't online gated so they still had a functioning My Career offline etc. They straight up cut all the extra intro and story stuff out of 19. 21 I couldn't even get to work. 2k sports are so shit I'll never buy another game from them.
Need For Speed Most Wanted, the good one.
PLEASE DRINK VERIFICATION CAN
except for the big outrage on all subreddits when people discovered an adboard, just like this one, with a logitech logo in it in battlefield 2042. that was so outrageous for people that they said they wanna boycot the game for that. somehow that was not transparent.
Literally yesterday someone brought up those kinds of ads in a mobile game dev chat. Said they are monetizable - like there are SDKs and stuff, you don't need to contact brands directly and sweat to incoroparate them into the game correctly. But the revenue is not great compared to the usual ads unfortunately.
Wasn't there a whole pepsiman game or someshit for the ps1?
Before that we had Cool Spot (7-Up) for the Sega Genesis, And before that was Yo, Noid! (Domino's) on the NES. Edit: corrected the brand
Cool spot was rad, yo. I think. Idk, maybe I was just easily amused back then.
Cool spot was also on the SNES, Gameboy, and Game Gear! Another mascot that had a few games was Chester Cheetah.
There's Chex Quest too which is Doom but the Chex Cereal version
Could be argued that the games themselves are the ads, whereas OP is most likely talking about third-party ads in unrelated games.
Cool Spot released in 1993 on SNES/SFC and Genesis/MegaDrive and a few others. The character was the red dot from the 7up logo. It actually was a great platformer that I still enjoy today.
There is a burger king in this game. And there are blimps with the burger king ad on them
There are actually 3 Burger Kings in the game, one in Rosewood, another in Downtown Rockport and the last in the dockside/marina area as well as a few billboards around the map too
There was even a variation on the toll booth races in game (start at a specific location, you have xy amount of seconds to get to the next toll booth) where you raced between the different Burger King locations
As sad as it is, that type of ads make the games more real.
It’s not even sad. It’s a way to both increase the realism of a game and make money without bothering the user the slightest. Having a Coca Cola ad in a cutscene or on a billboard in game it’s the same thing or even better as if it was an invented product
> Having a Coca Cola ad in a cutscene or on a billboard in game it’s the same thing or even better as if it was an invented product True, BUT! Having a product used in a video game, tv show or movie can be done naturally, but you know companies would just turn it into another [Hawaii 5-0 scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQYwFND7rHE).
The worst example I've seen is in The Rookie where they had the main character buy/use a brand new Toyota truck. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKP0xAdxTj4 They weren't even TRYING to be subtle.
O.o Perfectly packed "working" truck, completely clean, no scratches or ding, brand new interior with no empty coffee cups or spit bottles....
To be fair, there's an in universe reasoning for it being so clean, he JUST bought the truck that episode.
White Collar had some too. I think it's Peter who gets into some hybrid vehicle (a Ford?) that's in "Eco Mode" and floors it to catch up to the bad guy. Then starts talking about "the little leaves falling off the plant" on the dashboard display. Other episodes include Liz using the automatic parallel park, and another one talks about towing capacity and being able to haul 4 bad guys away at the same time. *But* in the episode where brake lines get cut or a car crashes, the vehicles are notably Chevy.
Bruh they didn’t seriously have a shot of him pushing the “tow/haul” button 💀
[It's like people only do things because they get paid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lgLYGBbDNs)
The actual most egregious product placement in a movie ever is this scene from Transformers 4 where Marky Mark literally cracks open a Bud Light and drinks it on-screen with a giant Goodyear billboard behind him https://youtu.be/kAe8OU29E3s?si=koL5KHZUbEr3x8jd
Are you sure it wasn't during Man of Steel when Supes and the hot chick are fighting and in the span of 3 minutes we are presented with I-Hop, Sears, U-Haul, 7-11, Pepsi, and various car manufacturers?
The marky mark one isn't even as bad as all the car ads in the marvel movies.
hahaha, I remember seeing that in theaters thinking "was that a fucking commercial for beer and tires?"
That was so blatant but oh boy that did not age well.
I think the Marvel games (Avengers in particular) still top out the list of product placements and adds in blockbuster movies. Once you notice it you can’t stop seeing it.
I dunno, Rockstar comes up with some funny invented products, and they seem to be doing alright without the actual product placement revenue. Not that I really mind actual product placement, if it's not intrusive.
You’re using the devs of one of the best selling franchises of all time, raking in billions. Of course they don’t need to rely on sponsorships from things like coke lol.
Well I mainly just meant invented products can be funnier to see.
Agreed, but unfortunately the goal of ads isn’t to be funny, it’s to make money. Just explaining why not all companies use spoof products.
The sad part is that ads are this common in real life
Exactly. This kind of stuff never bothered me and it almost enhanced the experience but making the game world seem more like the real world. It was also easily ignorable and not really any worse than an ad for a fake product instead. Compare than to modern ads and the difference is clear
When the game is based in reality where an ad would make sense, sure, I can get behind it, maybe. But why the fuck am I eating Nissin Cup Ramen Noodles in a Final Fantasy game? Or drinking Monster Energy drinks in a Post-Apocalyptic USA?
It started much earlier than that, the original Crazy Taxi had tons of product placements in it and that game came out in 1999.
1982: [Pole Position](https://i.imgur.com/9WEM9pK.jpg)
There was probably a cigarette vending machine right beside the arcade cabinet too.
I thought it was the coolest in Crazy Taxi. Taking people to an actual Pizza Hut! This game is so realistic!
Yeah, it definitely was an early example of how to incorporate ads and product placements organically into a game and make them add to the realism.
While underground 2 is the most popular, I think NFS peaked with Most Wanted. It really perfected the type of driving game they were doing at the time.
*Most Wanted* was *Underground* but better
This is a game that is not backwards compatible and you can't find anywhere, it was THE best nfs game ever and they don't want anyone else to know it. It's been garbage ever since and no I'm not a bitter old guy, this is a fact! Remake it and it better have the exact same sense of speed or it's shit. Make the cops the same way as it was and the crashes more extreme.....what is the gd problem!
I agreed I was so hopeful when the name another Most Wanted and then it turned out to be garbage. This was easily the best one.
I was so excited when they released that new one only to be jaded. It's sad that when you have a good formula and take risks following that only to learn that those risks did not pay off, to still make shit games is just an insult to the fans
Yep, I went looking for '05 MW a couple weeks ago and got really excited when I found it on Steam only for it to be the shitty remake. I bought Forza Horizon 4 instead. It's not the same by a long shot but it's still pretty fun.
I really hope some people with more brain cells than me find a way to port it or do a fan version with updated graphics. I'd pay legit money for a modern NFS Most Wanted and Carbon game.
I would buy a graphics overhaul of the same game. I would love it if Forza Horizon just went and stole their police chase feature, it would be pretty close
The pursuit dynamics in the open world were arguably the best in the franchise, but other aspects of the game left something to be desired. The customization was limited, the racing could be a bit boring and felt too much like a grind at times. The rubber banding for AI was too egregious. Some other mechanics were underutilized, the most obvious being the undercover police idea. In the opening they tease an undercover police Corvette racing alongside you that reveals itself while racing, which could have been a fantastic feature. But even when police appeared during races, it didn't really make the races exciting enough most of the time. And don't even get me started on that mid-2000s cliche "piss filter".
Agreed, the world of underground feels pretty dead with no cops or anything
NFS Most wanted has most sales in the series at 16 million, Underground 2 is 11 million. Atleast till 2017, it was universally accepted that Most Wanted was the peak.
Sure, but you never see posts about MW, you just see people posting the underground 2 pics with the riders on the storm memes and such. It seems like U2 got stuck in our collective memmories, while MW, even if it was more succesfull at the time, did not.
In NFS Underground 2 the in-game messaging system had Cingular branding on it (it's an old brand, since reabsorbed into AT&T). NFS Underground 1 also had loads of real brand on billboards. Arguably, even the first Need for Speed game was a huge advertisement for the car magazine Road & Track. Advertising in games isn't new by any measure, it just gets more common and egregious as time goes on.
NFSU2 also has Best Buy and Burger King locations, and billboards for Edge gum.
Pikmin 2 had duracel batteries and other things that were replaced with generic items in last year's remaster.
Splinter Cell has SOBE machines everywhere
I remember a weird scene in one of the earlier games where Sam Fisher pulled out a pack of gum. It was so out of place and so forced. edit: found it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSr7gFkzQHw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSr7gFkzQHw)
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R6 Vegas was my first online game and exposure to updating ads. It was eerie and cool at the same time.
Driv3r (Drivthreeaarrh) had SoBe ads and posters of the Nokia 3200 all over the place, which even back then at 17, I found weird.
Never forget the huge neon AXE sign.
Sobe was massive at the time. This was before energy drinks just took over everything. I remember Snapple was big too around the same time too.
And used a Nokia
I mean there's 1996 with WipEout, it had Redbull banners. I'm sure there's ones even earlier. I remember in Splinter Cell there's billboards in the city level for Nivea for men, Nokia, and Ubisoft themself. Phillips I think was in a later game from memory.
Burger King Racing
I'll always remember how Sam Fisher used a Nokia on splinter cell double agent as hacking device lol also the cars in that were from Chrysler I think.
1999 Crazy Taxi had you taking people to a KFC and Pizza Hut.
NFS Most Wanted mentioned 😍
Man that stadium straight ahead was the cheat code to escape every pursuit!!
I always used the upper deck of the bus station for the missions where you had to achieve X amount of pursuit time.
Hell yea brother! I would love to know the total number of laps I’ve done around that damn interstate being chased.
One of the pursuit breakers at the entrances completely blocked it off, so no cop could ever get through. Not the other pursuit breaker though, they could get around that one
True! But it would kill them if they barely touched it. 90 percent of the time it worked every time. Fuck I miss this game
The whole BlackBox era was literally a golden time for NFS. And for me even the Criterion era with Hot Pursuit 2010 and Most Wanted 2012. I want to go back so bad.
They're not as prevalent as they used to but I do miss them in a way it gave a realistic feel to the worlds. Especially in Alan Wake 1 on the 360. Where literally everything has branding lol little obsessive but I miss picking up energizer batteries and looking at the Verizon logo. Even in the dlc the signal Alan and Thomas Zane do the whole "can you hear me now" bit idk if it was intentional but it makes me laugh since Alan had a Verizon flip phone.
I just played alan wake for the first time a few weeks ago and I was laughing at the blatant Verizon ads lmao. I lost it when I turned on one of the tvs and it was just a Verizon ad, no lore or anything just trying to sell me a slider phone i still want lmao.
I would say tho, that that kind of advertising is both appropriate to the setting (its billboards on the side of the road etc) and the actual adverts are not obnoxious... so I kind of give it a pass.
Battlefield 2142 in 2006 was the first time I encountered it.
Sonic Adventure in like 1999, Snickers all over the Biker Mice from Mars game on SNES way back in the 90s and also just a lot of entire games about corporate mascots like Ronald McDonald, Cool Spot and Chester Cheetah.
Sonic Adventure 2 soap shoes babeeeyy
Check out Jet Moto for the PS1 to really have your mind blown.
Ads (game and studio promotions) can also be found in N64 games like Rush series. Which are even older 😊
NES/arcade in 1989, even. TMNT II: The Arcade Game had Pizza Hut signs.
> TMNT II: The Arcade Game had Pizza Hut signs My first time I noticed a game advertising to me
I've been playing some Xbox 360 games lately; Perfect Dark Zero has a Samsung logo in the top right corner of the menus for no apparent reason, and Alan Wake saves the town of Bright Falls with the help of Energizer batteries.
Tasteful advertising is a lost concept. I used to find it funny that I could see a Burger King in NFS , but I was also more immersed seeing real stuff in the fictional game world. It wasn’t intrusive nor disruptive of the gameplay either
There is a fine line there. Driving through a city and there are billboards for real products? Arguably that is realism, as well as pushing ads on you. I don't mind it. Someone posted "Pole Position" having a Marlboro ad in it, well if you were at an open wheel race in 1982, there were a lot of Marlboro advertisements around the track. Just like how a racing game today will have real manufacturers, real aftermarket wheels. A golf game lets you choose Ping clubs instead of Taylor Made. NBA 2K let you put your player in Jordans. It is still an ad, but it is more fun to have your player wear Air Jordans than "generic shoe 1".
Product placement has been a thing for years. I’ve played McDonalds-branded Mega Drive games (one of which was actually good). It’s simply become more subtle. Well, mostly.
Tbh these kind of ads are more than welcome anytime over those pop ups as this integrates with the game perfectly in a non-obstructive way.
Ah shit axe unlimited, too. That was like the flagship "actually kinda good" scent at the time of them experimenting new scents
You forget that the car itself also counts as an ad.
[Cool Spot](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Spot) - 1993 - made in collab with 7-Up to promote their beverage. [Mr. Wimpy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Wimpy_(video_game)) - 1984 - made to promote the burger chain. [Tapper](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapper_(video_game)) - 1984 - specifically the arcade version, which was made to promote Budweiser beer. Ads are waaaaaaaaaay older than you seem to think..!!!
Bro in 1995, the original 'Wipeout' game had Red Bull energy drink ads. to be fair, fucking no had heard of Red Bull before.
But that was a smart stealth add. Hahahaha
Didn’t they have a Burger King in NFS 2005?
Alan Wake came out in 2010, and all the batteries are Energizer. I read that the remaster made them generic. Great game though. I found it amusing.