In addition to flooding the streets with blood, 2003 also marked the year that Acclaim discovered new and exciting acts of animal cruelty. In an attempt to promote Virtua Tennis 2, Acclaim planned to spray paint twenty homing pigeons (or to the layman, dirty birds or flying rats) bright green with Virtua Tennis logos emblazoned on their wings and set them loose on the Super Bowl of tennis: Wimbledon.
Acclaim’s VP of Marketing justified the act much like a woman attempts to justify falling down the stairs to explain her black eye. "The Virtua Tennis 2 pigeon marketing campaign is highly targeted, as it brings awareness of the game directly to tennis enthusiasts. The Wimbledon tournament is famous for the occasional descent by pigeons onto center court, but our advertising pigeons are trained to go straight for the fans and flap their logos in front of them." Acclaim promised the paint would be safe for the birds, but let’s be realistic…humans can’t even spray paint in their own garage unless they aspire to immortalize themselves as well as their double-wides and stained wife beaters on Cops.
Bright green disease bags flapping a cloud of hepatitis and leprosy in my face to advertise a sucky tennis game equals pure awesomeness. As with almost every other scheme these purveyors of crappery had cooked up, the homing pigeon marketing never came to fruition. What it did do is generate a ton of hype and controversy, which is exactly what Acclaim wanted to happen in the first place. As a result, the world should hate itself a little more because of it.
And into the afterlife…
Of course, I’ve saved the best for last – or the vilest of the vile so to speak, given that Acclaim actually pulled this one off. Not a company to show respect for the dead, Acclaim offered to pay the funeral costs of any family who was willing to put an ad for Shadowman: 2nd Coming on the tombstone of a recently passed family member.
And just who were they intending to market this new form of advertising towards? “[the offer might] particularly interest poorer families" was their response, to which the world pretty much replied with the statement “die in a fire”.
While the Church of England denied allowing this to happen, there is some photographic proof of these tombstones floating around. Maybe Futurama wasn’t too far off with advertisers targeting our dreams next after all.
In the end, evil didn’t prevail and by 2004 Acclaim was dead and gone much to the chagrin to those of us who were trolling gaming news sites waiting for their next ingenious scheme. Anyone can point fingers at John Romero for threatening to make you his bitch with Daikatana or Sony for their laughably bad alliwantforxmasisapsp.com marketing bomb, but it’s safe to say that none of these come close to the pure, unbridled insanity of Acclaim’s marketing and PR departments. They’ll be remembered for setting an industry back twenty years with the likes of William Hung, Uwe Boll, and everyone affiliated with the making of Cavemen. Just be sure to remember this whenever anyone asks why the gaming industry can’t be taken seriously nowadays.
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