10 Video Games With Shameless Product Placement

9. Cool Spot - 7UP

92029 Zool 2 (World) 4
Virgin Games

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.

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Editorial Team
Editorial Team

Benjamin was born in 1987, and is still not dead. He variously enjoys classical music, old-school adventure games (they're not dead), and walks on the beach (albeit short - asthma, you know). He's currently trying to compile a comprehensive history of video game music, yet denies accusations that he purposefully targets niche audiences. He's often wrong about these things.