Having played computer games since I was 8 years old back in 1984, I’ve seen the use of marketing increasing with every year that passed since that day. In my opinion it all started with a single, simple, laughlingly idiotic way to sell games and it has become increasingly important. For some games the number of dollars spent on marketing games are even higher then the costs producing the game. And that is where it all went wrong.

Let me start by telling you about my first encounter with marketing and the game industry. It was the epic: ‘Pitfall!’ released by Activision, a company which name I could not care less about. In their game I took on the role of the obscure character: ‘Pitfall Harry’. I even felt it was quite an original name for such a bold adventurer. Back then I didn’t know any better, I was 9 years old. Besides the pleasure of making a little pixle of a man move on our huge television screen was enough to have me stunned. Not for long of course... soon I was dodging giant frogs and floating through the air hanging from balloons that mysteriously popped out of the murky underwater caves. But that was not all that kept me playing, day after day... after day.

There was another reason for me to play: ‘Pitfall!’. I could win a big cashprice. The first person to reach a certain score (was it 100,000?), won a cash-price (was it $ 1.000?) . All you needed do was take a picture of your screen with a camera and sent it to Activision. Yes, a picture with a real camera, there was no 'screen-capture' capability on the C64. The cash price proved good incentive to buy the game... most of my friends who bought the game were not that much into 'giant scorpion jumping' neither. They bought it for the same reasons as I did: we all wanted to take a shot at that money and what better way to earn it through playing games we figured.

Smart thinking back in 1984 especially considering the market for games was not as big as it is now. In fact the market had just gotten up after nearly being knocked out in the big gamesindustry crash of 1983. Back to Pitfall... who finally won the price and if this marketing campaign worked or did not work, I don’t know. At one point, some ten years later, I did start to notice another trend. I had moved on from action platform games on the C64 towards adventure games on my PC and we bought: Sierra’s games. These games came in big boxes, to hold one to ten floppy-disks.

I can’t help but laughing at the writing on these boxes and the promises being made. Walt Disney’s The Black Cauldron’ for example promised: ’30 animated characters that walk, talk, run, climb even swim!’, and ‘Eight musical tunes and seventy three-dimensional screens, in up to 16 colors.’ For the standards of that day and age, nothing funny... but it wasn't true. Your avatar could not run, climb and swim.. all you could do was walk around inside a picture consisting out of 16 different colours and use the parser to ‘interact’ with this world. Slowly but surely I started to understand what marketing is and what marketing does. It takes the truth and emphasises the things I would like about a game and plays down the things I would not like about it. Read any interview with Peter Molyneux and you know what I am talking about. Only recently has he started to realize he cannot promise anything, and now we're all awaiting Fable 2.

In the present day and age marketing campaigns are big and hit the target like a sniper rifle. Although even today someday they seem to miss the spot completely. The overhyping just seems to have become a central point in games marketing today and we could do so well without it.