Seanbaby
While psychology and elementary education majors are searching for their panties in a fraternity sleeping porch, marketing majors are doing a lot of homework. That's because launching a consumer product like a video game system is a complicated thing involving thousands of jobs. Despite careful planning and research, things always seem to go wrong. So maybe that's why Sega's idea for the Saturn was to say screw it and throw it into stores like it was a prank.So a gamer in early 1995 was looking at a Sega system that cost $399 and only had six titles.
This kind of stupid situation would have been familiar to them after the Sega CD and the Sega 32X, game systems that were designed to be less exciting alternatives to simply burning piles of money. Night Trap and Kriss Kross: Make My Video had already demonstrated that putting advanced audio/video technology in the hands of Sega is like giving a BeDazzler to a 5-year-old. Sega CD games looked like medical photos of body fungus with loading screens. And now that Sega had pissed off every retail outlet except four, and every video game developer except themselves, it wasn't looking good for the Saturn.
The Sony PlayStation cost $100 less and came out when it said it was going to come out, giving everyone time to do things like hang posters, show commercials and finish making PlayStation games. This turned out to be much better than Sega's strategy of telling all those people to fuck themselves and giving the Saturn a shorter life span than an overweight celebrity.
In the late '90s, John Romero was as famous and successful as a video game developer could be. He had made Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake. He raced Ferraris. He had long, flowing hair. His jeans were more sizes too small than the number of jean sizes that actually exist. Then a teaser ad came out for his upcoming game Daikatana. It was a mostly empty red page that told consumers that "John Romero's About to Make You His Bitch" and "Suck It Down," and nothing else. It isn't a nice way to sell a game, but it is a great way to tell the lucky stranger on the other side of a hole that they picked the best stall.
The saga of Ocean Marketing began with a guy named Dave contacting Ocean Marketing about his order of two Avenger game controllers. He began a correspondence with company representative Paul Christoforo, who, over the course of four emails, went from unhelpful dumbass to legendary dick. Paul's response to reasonable questions was telling a customer that he was going to keep the things he bought and sell them for inflated prices on eBay. You should also keep in mind that these controllers are specialized for disabled gamers, and Paul had to know that there was a very likely chance that he was threatening to steal from a handicapped person. That shouldn't make it more wrong, but it does by any possible standards.
When the Internet became a thing, the advertising industry started flailing. There was this entire new frontier of attention to grab and no wrong way to go about it. Thinking outside the envelope went from being an overused phrase about nonlinear thinking to a hard policy of derangement and 
Most of their ideas were so crazy that they weren't allowed to try them. For Burnout 2, they wanted to pay your ticket if you were caught speeding to the video game store. For Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance, they wanted to create bus stop ads that squirted blood onto the sidewalk. For Virtua Tennis 2, they wanted to paint pigeons and throw them into a Wimbledon game. Some kind of official stopped each of these things from taking place, and the only mention of them in the press came in the form of "What the shit is wrong with Acclaim?" Even for spastic attempts at telling the world you exist, I'd call that a string of losses.
Seanbaby invented being funny on the Internet. Learn more at 
1300 Comments