I was recently reminded of this advert from the first Burnout game, and it brought back just how bold and ambitious the marketing around it was.
The marketing and PR team at Acclaim at the time were really on it - edgy, risk-taking, and clearly having a lot of fun with Burnout.
Fun fact: we signed the game with Acclaim on Easter Sunday and shipped it in September. The actual contract didn't get signed until the day before e3 so we turned up at the show with the game running on a PlayStation test kit and had to show it to people in the store cupboard of the Acclaim stand. 20 minutes into the first day we had the editors from some of the major US magazines all playing it. It was all very last minute, a hell of a ride and the team at Acclaim Europe really pulled out all the stops under the leadership of Rod Cousens. He said to me just yesterday "the entire team at Acclaim were so creative and never short of ideas". No-one came close in those days.
This particular ad came from an agency called Branded, run by Phillip Ley. They were best known for Sega Mega Drive print and TV ads around the time of Sonic 2 - the infamous “Pirate TV” campaign. His stuff always came from an unexpected angle.
Acclaim were big on asking: what’s the most provocative thing you can put on a bus shelter or a billboard?
The holy grail billboard everyone wanted was on the A4 heading into London, right near where Sega’s offices used to be. Phillip’s Turok campaign there, “Save the Dinosaur”, was a fake charity appeal.
At the same time, retail had just started “selling the window”. Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus was the big one. If you wanted that window space, you had to give them something cool and interesting.
That’s what led to the crushed car....
I’ll go into the full story below for supporters, including how the crushed car actually came together, and some of the more questionable promotional ideas.
Much has been speculated about whether it was a real car - it was indeed a real car - but none of us know what make or model - it was an old banger from a scrapyard in East London. It had to be cheap, so they basically took whatever they could get. The original plan was to ship it between different stores, but that quickly proved too expensive and too complicated.
Linked to that was an early version of “pre-order and get something unique”. One store (possibly Electronics Boutique or HMV, I can’t remember) offered a paper cube of the crushed car, plus a CD with the “Everything can change in a blink of an eye” trailer. This was pre-YouTube, so getting a copy of a trailer like that was a big deal.
Luckily it is now on YouTube!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQjKBi_ZpuM
James Sheehan was the brand manager at Acclaim at the time. Simon Smith Wright was doing the PR and they really did a great job.
There was loads of mad stuff going on to promote the game. None of it would happen now.
They went to an illegal street racing meet to try and interview racers about caning it in their cars. The footage was unusable, so they re-shot it with one of the crew pretending to be a street racer.
Radio was big too. There was a phone-in quiz on Capital Radio with Dr Fox - “Take the Burnout Driving Test”. Acclaim even put a PlayStation demo pod in the Capital Radio DJ lounge, and they were all playing it.
They also had the man who taught Princess Diana to drive doing interviews at regional radio stations.
Honestly, I think half the things they talked about doing, they never actually did - they just talked about them loudly enough to get coverage in The Sun or The Mirror.
Different times. None of this would fly today - but it was memorable and it helped put Burnout on the map.
Final fun fact: Acclaim at one stage wanted to change the name to Pulse, and rename the Boost bar the Pulse meter.