Trigger Happy
and Alan Shearer to endorse their soccer games. In the United States, Sega has hired spokesmen of the likes of Boston Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez and Philadelphia 76er Allen Iverson, and has sponsored the San Francisco Giants in baseball and the Tennessee Titans and Oakland Raiders in football. Meanwhile, Sony sponsors the Vans Triple Crown series of sports such as snowboarding and freestyle motocross.
And videogames have gradually become a marketing medium in their own right. My first experience of the PlayStation, WipEout 2097, featured neon advertisements for Diesel jeans and Red Bull caffeine drinks that flashed by as you sped around its virtual racecourses. Stockholm company Addgames released Mall Maniacs in 1999, a bizarre “virtual supermarket” game whose entire development costs were covered by retail companies paying to have reconstructed presences in the digital world. Meanwhile Sega’s Dreamcast game, Crazy Taxi, in which the player drives passengers around an imaginary American town center, sports a suspicious number of people asking to go to the Pizza Hut or Kentucky Fried Chicken, restaurant franchises given their own near- photorealistic presences in the shopping area.
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