10 Insane Marketing Stunts That Were Used To Sell Video Games

7. Pigeons Were Spray-Painted With The Game's Logo (Virtua Tennis 2)

Virtua Tennis 2 PS2
Sega

Quite how someone came up with this idea is beyond us, but rest assured, this is a real thing that really happened in real life. Really.

As the name implies, Virtua Tennis 2 is about tennis, which gave the marketing folks over at Acclaim Entertainment a pretty great idea: why not take their game to Wimbledon, the most famous tennis tournament in the world, watched by millions around the globe each year?

But rather than just putting up billboards, handing out pamphlets or setting up a demo booth, the company decided to spray-paint 20 pigeons with the game's logo, training them to fly in and out of the tennis courts at the event. Acclaim made it clear that the birds were not harmed in any way, and that they would not be released during actual matches - just during warm-ups.

What's more, the pigeons were reportedly trained to fly up to people in the crowd and flap the game's logo in front of them. Because of this, they were dubbed "flying billboards" by the press, which seems like a missed opportunity to us. Why not "flying bill-birds"? Bill-birds. Right? Guys?

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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!