Back within the noughties, video game publishers Acclaim have been masters of the scandalous PR stunt. For Shadow Man 2, they provided to pay funeral prices to place adverts on tombstones. They provided to pay rushing fines on Burnout 2’s launch day. They wished bus shelter posters leaking pretend blood. They claimed that they had pigeons spraypainted with Virtua Tennis 2 logos to fly round Wimbledon. In a little bit of pointless investigative journalism of the easiest type, Connor Makar on VG247 has probed their 2002 stunt of selling Turok four by providing £500 should you legally modified your identify to ‘Turok’. Go learn it, yeah?
Acclaim, for the advantage of youthful readers, mainly did Devolver Digital’s complete ‘blood and scandal’ factor however for actual. Devolver want they’d considered BMX XXX, a topless BMX stunt game, or paying people $10,000 to name their baby Turok. Acclaim tried to assert newspaper headlines with stunning, gross, and craven advertising stunts, they usually usually succeeded.
You have to recollect, younger’uns, that this was the millennium-straddling interval which historians and lecturers have dubbed ‘the Attitude Era’.
The specific stunt Makar centered on was one in all a number of across the debut of Turok: Evolution in 2002. As properly as providing cash for naming American infants Turok, they helpfully offering a tent with a TV and generator to a person queuing outdoors the Electronics Boutique on Oxford Street for 20 days, and offered UK folks £500, an Xbox, and every Turok game for altering their very own names to Turok by deed ballot for one 12 months. Makar went searching for the 5 individuals who took the money to turn into Turok, dinosaur hunter, and what he discovered was… actually by no means surprisingly, actually.
It is a good read. I’m properly into folks placing the legwork into chasing down 18-year-old nonsense. Go, take pleasure in.
