Matt Hazard Lives
I hate marketing - but I love a fake marketing campaign. By now you may have heard about the story of Matt Hazard, an action game with a twenty-five year history that spans The Adventures of Matt in Hazard Land, A Fistfull of Hazard, You Only Live 1,317 Times, and Choking Hazard: Candy Gramm.
The beauty of the whole thing is that the whole history is fake: to draw attention to the title, D3’s publicists invented the entire gaming franchise, with all the hits and flops to go with it. This is extra funny now that people are playing Mega Man 9 and then running around the web pretending they know everything about Mega Man 8, Mega Man 7, and so on. And if retro titles and inflating your childhood cred are big fads, why not play along by making it all up? Nobody who claims they beat Contra Hard Corps on the Sega Genesis ever has to prove it. So why stop there? We should all be inventing ridiculous lost games and rail about how we slapped them raw.
Another grace note: D3 invented a developer named Ralph Tokey and gave him a blog where he can rant and rave about the franchise and its true legacy. He even claims he invented the “As a policy, we do not comment on rumors” line so popular with games publishers today. I hope Tokey sticks around a while. He’s a little egomaniacal for a made-up man, but I like his style.
One question: can the real game possibly live up to its marketing campaign? This is the same publisher that brought us Dark Sector. Just saying.
10/10/2008 at 1:27 pm Permalink
It’s always frightening when an ad campaign completely disarms me and makes me vow to bow whatever they are talking about. I love the Matt Hazard thing. I love that people in forums have gotten so into it that they have started making up their own slogans: BRING THE HAZARD!
Honestly, I think the best sign that video games are going strong culturally is that we’re now getting to a point that we can laugh at ourselves.