WHEN it comes to marketing, anything goes, and companies will go to great lengths to get their product noticed.
This is particularly true for video games, as dozens of games are released every week and the big names tend to dominate the headlines.
Gori wants you to eat lunch with your cats[/caption]We’ve seen plenty of wacky marketing campaigns over the years, including when Sony brought a dead goat to a party to promote God of War.
But even dining with a dead goat doesn’t compare to the disgust I felt when faced with a recent gaming promotional campaign.
From the same game marketing campaign that brought us the furry Xbox, we now have the Tinner4Two, a tin containing dinner for both gamers and their cats.
Gori: Cuddle Carnage is a beat ‘em up where you play as the anthropomorphic cat Gori on his mission to save the world.
Just as Gori combines both human and cat in his character, the Tinner4Two combines both cat and human meals.
Luckily, this promotional item isn’t nearly as disgusting as it first sounds. While it appears to be one tin with both components – spaghetti and cat food – it’s actually two tins tightly glued together.
You might ask what this has to do with gaming, and Wired’s promotional material has you covered in that department.
The packaging reads: “Wired surveyed 97 video game players and found that nearly half owned a cat.
“Yet staggeringly, on average, they lost up to 23 minutes per day every lunchtime feeding themselves and then their cat.
“We timed a player and their cat eating this and found it saved a whopping 18 minutes every day – that’s 109 hours every year saved, an incredible 4 and a half days extra you can play Gori: Cuddly Carnage, or any video game of your choice!”
While tinned spaghetti every day might not be your lunch of choice the packaging boasts that it constitutes one of your five a day, which either means there’s a whole tomato in there, or the standards for five a day have slipped.
But if I can save four and a half days a year by living on tinned pasta, who am I to argue?
The cat food stank which obviously means that my cats loved it, which did save me time over catering to each kitty’s palate.
On the other hand, I found the spaghetti inedible and I don’t think cooking it saved time compared to making a sandwich.
If you pop out for a meal deal every day, it might save you those precious 18 minutes daily, but I think I’ll stick to ham sarnies.
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