10 Ridiculous Ways Adverts Were Built Into Video Games

9. Burnout Paradise's Obama Billboards

Burnout Paradise Obama billboard
EA

The brilliant Burnout Paradise was littered with in-game advertisements from companies like Gillette, Burger King, and Vizio, but its weirdest inclusion was definitely a series of huge Barack Obama billboards, which popped up to promote the then-Presidential candidate's White House campaign.

Starting on 6 October 2008 and running until 3 November of the same year, the Xbox 360 version of the game played host to several of these Democratic party billboards, urging players to vote. The ads were paid for by the Obama campaign, and only appeared in ten U.S. states - including Iowa and Ohio - which traditionally went to the opposing Republican party.

While EA did issue an official statement to clarify that this was not an endorsement of Obama or his policies, the publisher was clearly happy to earn that extra bit of money, and reportedly, they even approached Republican candidate John McCain, who passed on the proposal.

Funnily enough, Obama won all but one of those ten states in the end, so who knows? Maybe Burnout Paradise was what swayed the vote.

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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!