10 Insane Marketing Stunts That Were Used To Sell Video Games

8. Copies Of The Game Were Launched Into Space (Mass Effect 3)

Mass Effect 3
Bioware

Similar to BioShock 2's beach bottle event, the Mass Effect 3 marketing team also implemented a stunt that actively engaged members of the community.

Using select cities around the world (New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Paris, London and Berlin) as a starting point, EA decided to strap copies of the game to weather balloons, and send them into space. Each copy of the game had a camera and GPS system attached so players could track its location, and best of all, if the player managed to find the balloon when it landed back on Earth, they could keep the game and play it early.

This resulted in YouTube videos of people tracking balloons in their country, collaborative forum posts with people helping each other out, and the story being plastered all over mainstream media outlets for weeks. The stunt was a rousing success, and despite the game disappointing hardcore fans, it sold extremely well.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!