All he had to do was combine them with prize games, and appeal to the greed of the public and the willingness of corporates to part with their money. PiMania was also the first videogame to feature multimedia mass merchandising, with weekly comic strips, live appearances of The PiMan character on TV and at trade fairs, a series of rock albums, a membership club, a fanzine, a telephone hotline, t-shirts, calendars, and an entire series of spin-off video games.įor live appearances The PiMan was played by Christian Penfold in a horrendously tight pink jumpsuit, while Mel usually dressed up as Groucho Marx and insisted on playing live music to the bewildered masses.ġ994 | First million-user viral marketing campaignįor once Mel got the timing right, and the timing involved a new phenomenon called emails and an old habit called software piracy. This technique later became known as geocaching. It was probably not the first adventure game to offer a prize to the winner, but it was certainly the first to locate the adventure in the real world and require players to turn up at the right place and the right time to claim the prize - a sundial made of obsidian, gold and diamonds, commissioned from the De Beers Diamond Award Winner.
In 1982, Mel designed a real world computer quest called PiMania. 1982 | First videogame mass merchandising
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