Virtua Tennis Pigeons Divebomb Wimbledon

Thanks to several readers for pointing to a GameSpot story indicating Acclaim will use spray-painted homing pigeons to advertise Virtua Tennis 2 at this year's Wimbledon tennis tournament. According to Acclaim's marketing director, Larry Sparks, "The Virtua Tennis 2 pigeon marketing campaign is highly targeted as it brings awareness of the game directly to tennis enthusiasts.. the Wimbledon tournament is famous for the occasional descent by pigeons onto Centre Court, but our advertising pigeons are trained to go straight for the fans and flap their logos in front of them." Acclaim are sadly infamous for other desperately outlandish publicity stunts, such as getting proud parents to name their baby Turok and trying to place videogame adverts on gravestones.

Comments

... tasteful?

[sporty]

This is not at all tasteful.

1. It's acceptable if a bird or two comes by and decides to do whatever during the event, on its own volition. It's something you have to live with when playing outdoors.

2. This is clearly, clearly, an intentional act that may or maynot disrupt the event.

3. Couldn't a rented plane be just as effective without taking what was once a wild animal and training it to do something that it naturally wouldn't do? No, I'm not a fan of circuses either. It'd be tasteful too. Hell, do one of those neat sky writting things.

4. Companies do "normal" advertising targeted at events. I.e. you don't see ads for tampons at hockey events but you'll see golf equipt ads during golf events. Hrm...

Virtua tennis rocks!

[metalhed77]

I had the original virtua tennis (for sega saturn i believe? i forgot, i lost it years ago), and it was the only worthwhile tennis game i've played on a console ever.It offered pretty much perfect control, with very simple controls. In addition, the feel of it matched real tennis quite well (well as well as any game can be expected). From the reviews I've seen virtua tennis 2 is simply an updated version of this perfect game. Which is exactly what was needed, as I don't think you see the original around much, and graphics can always be improved.