10 Video Games With Shameless Product Placement

9. Cool Spot - 7UP

Back in the early '90s, some devious advertising exec. was paid an absolute wad by the Dr Pepper Group to spend all of thirty seconds drawing a red circle in Deluxe Paint. Actually, that does them a disservice; they did stretch to adding a pair of obligatory 'rad' shades. They don't call him Cool Spot for nothing.

7UP's geometric mascot starred in no fewer than four games bearing his name. The first, 1990's Spot: The Video Game, was inexplicably a strategy sim, clarified by the knowledge that the Spot license was latterly added to Virgin Mastertronic's Infection. Spot's second outing, Spot: The Cool Adventure, was in fact a reskinned McDonaldland, making it a sort of perverse advertorial inception.

The red lad's most well-known pixel conversion, Cool Spot, had a much more traditional guise: a typical early-'90s platformer frankly far better than it had any right to be. 7UP tried replacing Spot with the gnarly sketch-man Fido Dido in 1993, and a game featuring him was very closed to being released, before the company realised he was a bit sh*t and cancelled it.