Nintendo Hires Walking Gamers

Plug1 writes "CNN.com has an interesting article about nintendo hiring people to offer free samples of their games. Stephen Pellitier "will wear a 15-inch flat-screen TV on his chest and a pack of batteries on his back. With a game console and joysticks dangling from his waist, he will spend his weekends inviting passers-by to play games."" imagine the possible pickup lines involving joysticks, buttons, and playing with them! The potential for being beaten on the streets is just amazing!

Comments

The Amazing Walking Bilboard

[Calimus]

We all knew this was going to happen at some point. We are already a walking advertisements (nike hats, shoes, shirts, etc..) it's really about time in this day and age that human advertising machine became interactive.

Think about the future this could bring, We advance from having a flat screen on the front and batteries on the back to an imbeded LCD/plasma screen in the chest and runs right off the electricity created by the brain. The games/advertisements are stored in the brain as well and just played back from memory.

Who needs walls and signs when the human body could do it more efficiently.

Of course, when this happens for real, I think it will be time to check myself out of the gene pool.

Re:The Amazing Walking Bilboard

[SirSlud]

The more this proliferates, the more people there will be like my friend, who's taken to removing logos from everything he wears - even gifts, etc.

Remember the ying and yang - as this kind of thing becomes more popular, the counter-advertising culture will have to take _their_ campaign to a whole new level. This is what I'm most interested in seeing.

Re:The Amazing Walking Bilboard

[BlackGriffen]

Yes, the future of advertising, yesterday. People walking around wearing placards are as old as advertising, this just happens to be an interactive placard.

"Think about the future this could bring, We advance from having a flat screen on the front and batteries on the back to an imbeded LCD/plasma screen in the chest and runs right off the electricity created by the brain. The games/advertisements are stored in the brain as well and just played back from memory."

Yeah, but what will the screen show when he checks out that hot chick walking by? Memories of his first time? ;)

BlackGriffen

$100 a day, $35000 per year??

[wompser]

Boy, do I feel sorry for these people. I used to work for a promotional marketing company (who would subcontract to do these kinds of promotions), and this is some of the hardest work you can imagine. People are downright MEAN to people who do this kind of work, and $100 a day would not be enough to get me to do it!

You think being beat up is unrealistic? How about taking insults all day about how much cooler Dreamcast, xbox, is? How about the snotty kid who wants to play for hours? Good luck to these people, they will need it!!!

I was a Nintendo Demonstrator....

[ronfar]

It was a lot of fun. Of course, that was back in the 16-Bit era, when Sega and Nintendo fought for supremacy and the Play Station was still concieved as the CD add on for the SNES. Basically, it involved standing in front of a kiosk at the mall (in this case inside a Captron store), handing out stickers and talking up the games. I also got to choose which games to display (although Nintendo preferred it if you gave preference to their own games. The Nintendo rep mentioned it when she noticed I liked to show off "Prince of Persia," but I was a big fan of that game at the time.). Oh, and I think I got whatever New Jersey's minimum wage was at the time, which was considerably less than $100 per day. (Still, my memory has started playing tricks on me with advancing age...)

I did pretty well at it, and won a Mario Paint. (It was all location, Christmas time at one of the busiest malls in New Jersey.)

Of course, this version of a Nintendo demostrator sounds like a real life rip off of the Sega game, "The Typing of the Dead." In that game, if you've never seen it, the Agents have Dreamcasts with big batteries attached to their back and Dreamcast keyboards in front as they kill off zombies with a well typed phrase. (Too bad "Typing of the Dead" isn't coming out, as far as I know, for Gamecube. They could package it with the keyboard peripheral they are supposed to release...)

<wistful sigh> ... well, now I'm off to sleep (well, to watch an episode of Trigun and then sleep) I have to go to my boring Web $TITLE job tommorrow... Hope those kids enjoy their time as Nintendo demonstrators... </wistful sigh>