10 Video Games With Shameless Product Placement

9. Cool Spot - 7UP

Cool Spot
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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Zool Amiga
 
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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.