| ARTICLE |  Japan |
Dokomodake, the happy little mushroom made by Japanese telephone company NTT DoCoMo to sell more cell phones, is getting his own Nintendo DS game on December 6. Dokomodake is a well known corporate mascot. Let’s say it is NTT DoCoMo’s Ronald McDonald. The character is everywhere in Japan, usually dangling off of cell phones. Plus he’s cute looking so that’s probably another selling point for AQ Interactive. Still it’s awkward to see corporate mascots in games and I can’t think of one paid advergame that turned out well.
Little details are known about Pororon! Dokomodake, except that it’s a puzzle-action game and it will be around at Tokyo Game Show.
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September 18th, 2007 at 6:28 pm
Cool Spot, a little known 2D platformer for the Genesis and SNES developed by Virgin (with some of their staff later leaving the company to form Shiny who went on to develop Earthworm Jim 1 and 2) pops to mind when I think of a enjoyable corporate mascot game.
As a matter of fact, Chex Quest is arguably the most popular commercial game of all time, an Ultimate Doom clone developed by the now defunct Digital Café and distributed in boxes of Chex cereal in 1997. To this day, it still remains hugely popular garnering a large and devoted fanbase, with an official sequel available for download on the Internet followed by numerous fanmade installments including Chex Quest 3 (actually complied by Digital Café themselves before they went belly under).
I’d say it’s entirely possible to get good results, although this depends strictly on the creditably of the developer and most importantly if they put any effort into the product.