8 Video Game Product Placements So Good We Bought In

Nothing ruins the immersion of a work of visionary art like the protagonist, let's say in this instance a taciturn postman lugging Amazon deliveries from one rugged mountain to the next in a belaboured and somewhat conceited attempt to 'reconnect the world', topping up his stamina by chugging a can of a branded energy drink which somehow managed to survive an apocalyptic event that reduced the rest of the world to ruins.

Yet that's precisely what happens in Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding by Hideo Kojima (a Hideo Kojima game), a laudatory piece of fiction which apparently moves the industry forward (very slowly) in as yet only patchily explained ways. In a piece of probably unintentional meta-humour, Sam Porter Bridge's p*ss does at least become weaponised after downing Monster. This mechanic probably wasn't explicitly approved.

Death Stranding compromises its interesting if not necessarily groundbreaking message for a quick (and admittedly, probably necessary) buck then, but its product placement needn't have been quite so incongruous. Though it's generally hard not to inspire head-shakes with random commercial partnership, a few titles have managed to shill in such a creative way that not only did we let them off - but opened up our wallets.

During the ninth level of Rare's genre-defining first-person shooter GoldenEye 007 - already a bizarre tie-in for a movie which released two years earlier - the world's most well-known and therefore worst spy James 'Jim' Bond finds himself grabbed by the Spetsnaz (ouch!), and secreted in an underground complex below the Arctic wastes of Servernaya, Siberia.

Should 007 manage to escape his cell (and given the careless Russian guards have both handily placed the key directly in front of him and failed to confiscate his magic magnetic watch gizmo, it's likely) his next objective, as per the mission dossier, is to recover the security tape of his capture.

You'd expect this to be a simple VHS recording, with the words 'Nosy England Agent' scrawled on the label in black marker, but in a piece of brilliant albeit ludicrous promotional meta-humour, the tape in question is actually a store bought copy of the Goldeneye movie. Well, it had been on the shelves for about 18 months once the game came out. No wonder the Russians saw Bond coming.