We tend to think of the advergame as a relatively modern creature, connected to the bright lights and high speeds of contemporary internet culture. Recent panels and presentations at GDC and Develop have placed a renewed emphasis on the advergame. The relationship between advertising design and videogames is long and varied, perhaps as old as the medium itself. To best understand how games design and advertising have exchanged ideas and principles, you need to take a long term view.

During the 1990s we saw some of the most fruitful and downright perculiar relationships forged between brands and game developers. The strength of North American pop-culture products in the global marketplace established an appetite for a range of consumables, broadly associated together under the banner of youth culture. In the UK, corporate groups like Richard Branson’s Virgin made the move into the videogames arena, with Virgin Interactive publishing a broad portfolio of games in a relatively small period of time.

Nowadays, games that are explicitly associated with film or television licenses or commercial brands have a hard time trying to convince gaming connoisseurs that they are worthwhile. Since the advent of PlayStation, games culture has developed its own ecology of strong iconic brands, named developers, and a much broader constituency of players. When values such as “cute” and “cool” are inherently tied to the properties generated by the hardware manufacturers (Super Mario Galaxy and Wipeout for instance), then the license game is perhaps always going to be positioned as secondary to the “more authentic” first party content (in the eyes of the critics at least).

Over the past two decades game culture has diversified. Hindsight is a wonderful thing; we can look back at the games of the early 1990s and see how much more of a monoculture there was in the industry, and among consumers. The videogame hadn’t gone “mainstream” and as such, the relationship between games and brands was uniquely negotiated. As a subculture, in the UK games shared a lot of retail space with video, music and comic books. The games industry had yet to capture the power of television marketing, and the internet was still a university lab experiment.

As in the 1980s, the videogames of the 1990s relied heavily on their own dedicated press, through the games magazines and periodicals, to promote their latest work and communicate with consumers. In turn magazines, and publishers like UK-based Future, relied heavily on the revenue from selling ad space. As you can imagine, this created the intriguing predicament of games being reviewed, perhaps harshly with low scores, at the same time as publishers and developers had purchased dedicated ad space for those titles. The expectation surrounding new releases and their reviews seemed perhaps more tangible and important in the heyday of the game mag, precisely because all facets of the culture could be contained within their pages, since the culture itself was so clearly demarcated.

GAMES AT HOME

Into this picture came the large corporate representatives and the brands, who were looking to capture some of immediate appeal of videogames culture in the moment where it appeared to be breaking into the mainstream. The games arcade, the primary signifier of games culture from the 1970s onward, had begin to wane insofar as arcades around the country couldn’t compete with the new home console market, and the increased expense of rental and maintenance of new machines from Japan. Games had gone domestic, and as such they related to a much greater degree to the television and video culture than ever before. In particular, it was the positioning of the console under the main family television, as compared to the home computer which often had its own dedicated space, that defined the new era of videogames from the late 1980s onward.

By placing the console underneath the television, a number of different factors became apparent. Firstly there was the competition for physical space. With the cable TV box, the VHS recorder and the games console all copresent underneath or around the television, erstwhile parents must have been duly concerned about the sheer amount of electronic clutter that was accumulating in the communal space. Beyond this, there was the more pressing issue of competition between family members, and as such different demographics, over the different uses of the television. Television as television, television for video, and now television for games. The sovereign dominance of the programme schedule was now called into question by a new and complex approach to the old grey box. I certainly remember from the Atari 2600 onward a rumbling tension over what goes on the screen, Dad’s programmes, little sisters VHS or my games?

To a certain extent, a household “disagreeing” about videogames was the everyday culture of games for quite some time. This certainly has an impact on the perception of videogames as a space for advertising. If, through the use of videogames, the television and the living room become “specialised”, and as such only one or two members of the family engage with or enter into that space, then their commercial capacity to communicate brands in limited.

TECHNOLOGY

In this respect, commercial brands have needed games to broaden their appeal. Also, they have needed games to expand their representational capacity, which is to say, games needed to get better graphics. Only with increased graphical and sound capability could a videogame make a relevant and effective connection to a commercial brand being depicted through television, print and cinema media, where image fidelity was, and continues to be, a key parameter.

With the advent of the 16-bit consoles, the SEGA Mega Drive (Genesis) the Super Nintendo (Super Famicom), and the TurboGrafx-16 (PC Engine), that kind of increased sound and image capability became a reality. All the consoles, though especially the Mega Drive, were heavily promoted through the concept of 16-bit.

The notion of “16-bit” is significant in that it effectively doubles the power of the previous generation of hardware at 8-bit, and so begins the popular debate about processor power that is now the mainstay of “console war” discussions everywhere. Beyond the internal debates of game culture however, we can see how the promotion of values such as “arcade quality”, “cinematic sound” and “improved control” were directed outward to new player demographics and in particular, other media industries and commerical institutions.

CHARACTER CULTURE

Larger on-screen sprites, a broader colour palette and better sound meant that games designers began to think within the knowledge base that had been long established by the animation industry, namely character design and serial franchises. Remember the palpable sense of shock that came with going into our local games arcade and seeing the huge on-screen sprites for beat-em-ups like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II. A recognisable, knowable and lovable character designed for a videogame could make the transfer to other media in a way that the sprites of the previous generation couldn’t, and as such there was a huge commercial incentive from licensing to produce game properties that could be realised in other media.

Earlier on we mentioned Virgin Interactive, as being one of the key stakeholders in the first wave of advergames. Virgin Games Ltd. (as they were then known) developed titles for McDonalds, the fast food chain, 7-UP, the soft drink, and a selection of movie licenses, including Disney’s Aladdin. The capacity of the 16-bit consoles to deliver complex animation meant they marketing departments could emulate comic book and animation promotional tropes and trends, and Virgin Games actively exploited this link, creating extensive campaigns to promote their titles. It helps that the games they made in this period were very strong, not least because of the input of Dave Perry, games designer and programmer and founder of Shiny Entertainment.

For McDonalds, Virgin Interactive created Mick and Mack Global Gladiators (1992), a game which followed the exploits of two eponymous heroes, through a series of levels each with a strong ecological narrative. A year later, Perry and Virgin would create Cool Spot (1993), a game license based on the “Spot” character (different from their other character Fido Dido). In each of these games, character design, illustrative promotion and robust gameplay took centre stage. Their actual affiliation to known brands was downplayed; rarely in the course of gameplay within Mick and Mack or Cool Spot were you being bashed over the head by a brand making itself known, rather, branded title screens and credits acted to effectively “bracket” or sandwich the gameplay.

The design of Spot, and his implementation, took reference from Sonic the Hedgehog, the mascot of the 16-bit generation, in an explicit act of deference to the trends emerging from within “games as games”. The literacy players developed through the playing of dominant franchises like Sonic could be captured and employed in the design of games like Cool Spot, a fact which Perry seemed acutely aware of. A franchise game could be playable and engaging, if the brands that backed them allowed “gameness” to dominate.

The compression of contemporary design and development schedules mean that contemporary franchise games must necessarily time their delivery to coincide with major film releases, or in many cases precede them. We think the more that games design becomes part of advertising design culture, the more we should think about what has come before, examine what worked, and what didn’t, and really think thoroughly about who our advergames are really speaking to. Dave Perry’s games from the 1990s created at Virgin Interactive were played by an incredibly broad demographic, and people will still relate incredibly fond memories of playing them. If we see them not only as games, but also as ad campaigns, then these games — which put the play experience first — might be considered design classics.