Virgin Interactive is spending pounds 500,000 on a single week’s
poster blitz to promote three games in the run-up to Christmas. The
work, through Banks Hoggins O’Shea, will run on 3,000 sites
nationwide.
The ads, which launch on 16 December, comprise three separate campaigns
created for Streetfighter, Resident Evil and Bladerunner.
For the latest 3D version of Streetfighter, a game in which players
choose a character with particular skills to take on an array of
baddies, the posters suggest that the only way to replicate the
adrenalin rush of the game is to stand in the street and shout something
controversial. ’Northern gits’ is the phrase proposed in posters on all
streets in the North of England, while posters in the South suggest
’Southern poofs’.
Bladerunner is based on the cult film of the same name which tells the
futuristic story of bounty hunters who track down and ’retire’ so-called
replicants, which look like humans, but are not. The posters are
correspondingly macabre.
One execution shows the prostrate figure of a replicant over the
headline: ’I had to get this guy out of my hair. Fingernails ...
carpet ...’, while another features a similar body and the words: ’It
takes guts to do what I do. Theirs.’
Markham Smith wrote and Richard Dennison art directed the Streetfighter
posters, while the Bladerunner executions were written by Bryn Attewell,
art directed by Mark Robinson and photographed by Lee Jenkins. Media for
the campaign was planned and bought by Banks Hoggins.
