GameSlice: Behind the Scenes of the Computer and Video Game Industry

ADVERTISING EDITION
By: Geoff Keighley

Nov. 11th, 2000

This Week:
- Monkey Island 4
- Gunman Chronicles
- Red Alert 2
- Unreal Tournament

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Escape from Monkey Island
LucasArts

View the ad: Page 1 or Page 2

Although we often see movie ads with great taglines, game ads are usually known for lame taglines – a case in point is the Gunman Chronicles ad reviewed on the next page. However, LucasArts’ Escape from Monkey Island has one of the more memorable taglines referring to pirate wannabe Guybrush Threepwood: “Finally, a software pirate you can trust.”

This two-page ad also has a clean and uncluttered look thanks to a beautiful hand-drawn poster-like image of Guybrush and the main characters. While most publishers always try to go the 3D-rendered route for ads, I’d argue that this Monkey Island image looks better than anything you could whip up in 3D. While the three screenshots are admittedly a bit too small – and it would have been nice to see more game images, especially given the product’s vast array of locations – the ad is pleasing to the eye…something that can be seldom said of game advertising.

But there’s room for improvement. While I’m never a fan of advertising moonlighting as a product fact sheet (remember those Sacrifice ads that had a page of text in 8-point type?), LucasArts missed to opportunity to introduce us to the game's story. Sure, the text block in the ad is a send-up of the billing block on a movie poster, but it would have been a better use of space to capsulate the game’s story in a sentence or two.

Grade: A-

Next, Gunning Into Outerspace >