Aaahhh.. the 2000s, the generation of “millennials” (?!), the period when processed food recipes contained “NOW WITH LESS SUGAR”, “RECIPE WITH LESS SALT”.
Just because consumers are starting to understand the health harms of salt and sugar abundance doesn’t mean we should stop selling it to children!
In this period, we find the same multinational companies that have been selling chips, sodas, burgers to the whole world for decades. This time around, multiple brands have entire game series featuring their mascots that span several generations of consoles.
Honestly, I don’t understand the principle.
Is it about selling games with well-known mascots? To sell games that sell food? To capitalize on the popularity of candy to sell video games?
Here is a small selection of product placements for food in video games. The list is therefore not exhaustive.
Except for SEGA games, these titles are mostly of poor quality.
SEGA Games
So now, we’re going to start touching on the sacred, on games cherished by gamers, myself included. These games are not product placements per se, there are no brands in the title, but contain product placements inside the games. Indeed, at the time SEGA had suffered many failures, and had to find ways to replenish the coffers, so it was with these games that SEGA integrated some product placements.
Crazy Taxi (1999)
The adaptation of the arcade’s hit features players driving a taxi through a transcription of San Francisco and picking up and dropping off passengers at their destination. In the original version, the destinations include many well-known shops and restaurants like FILA, KFC, and Pizza Hut.
Super Monkey Ball (2002)
Super Monkey Ball involves steering a monkey locked in a ball by tilting the levels with the left stick of your controllers. Monkeys can collect bananas in complicated levels in order to get more points. In the early versions of the game, the bananas had the Dole logo on them, bearing the image of the food company of the same name.
It’s not the most disturbing product placement, but it still stuck in the minds of gamers.
The Burger King Games (2006)
Yes, Burger King has also released 3 games or advergames (for advertisements games) for Xbox 360. They were sold directly at Burger King restaurants in North America.
Named PocketBike Racer, Sneak King, Big Bumpin’, they have achieved cult status despite their poor playfulness. But I’ll let the experts on the Noclip YouTube channel explain this much better than I can in English.
Doritos Games
In the early days of Xbox 360, Xbox Live Arcade kicked off and gave millions of developers the opportunity to release lower-budget games that could be accessed directly through the console’s online store.
This allowed Doritos to release two Advergames (advertising games, promotionals) for free for console players.
Advertising is displayed clearly in the games, but it was a fun opportunity to play with the avatars we had designed, all for free.
Doritos Dash of Destruction (2008)
Doritos Crash Course (2010)
Smarties: Meltdown (2006)
There are few Smarties games, and the most “well-known” of them is this one, released on Playstation 2 and filled with bugs. A very bad game, but that doesn’t stop collectors from getting it, or speedrunners from improving their times on it.
World Gone Sour (2011, 2012)
World Gone Sour is a game developed by Playbrains and published by Capcom. It promotes Sour Patch Kids, a type of sour gummies, mostly found in the United States. As we can see in the following videos, the game has benefited from a large marketing budget with a rap clip as a bonus. However, the platform game featuring candy did not make an impression. I had even forgotten about it until I did my research.
