8 Amazing Video Games With TERRIBLE Marketing

First impressions count for a lot, and if you tell the general public that your game stinks, they're probably going to believe you.

That quite literally turned out to be the case with 1994's legendary RPG Earthbound, which saw Nintendo spend a mind-boggling $2 million on a U.S. marketing campaign focused on gross-out humour.

Though such humour was popular throughout the 1990s, promotional ads straight-up declared "This game stinks!" and dubbed it "the first role-playing game with B.O."

Furthermore, these ads had a scratch-and-sniff component, resulting in it becoming the most complained about video game ad of 1995 through sheer sensory repulsiveness.

And that caused Earthbound to basically get all the wrong attention, prompting it to flop so badly in the U.S. that Nintendo didn't even bother with a European release.

Even accepting that Earthbound is a profoundly weird game and never would've been a sales juggernaut, Nintendo totally whiffed it with a misguided marketing campaign that basically only generated anti-hype.