Interview zu Advergames
Anfang des Jahres bekam ich eine Anfrage von Damiano Gerli, Spielgeschichts-Journalist aus Italien und Betreiber des Genesis Temple. Gerli recherchierte gerade zu Werbespielen in Europa und bat mich, ihm ein paar Informationen zu deren Entwicklung und Verbreitung in Deutschland zu geben. Der entsprechende Artikel ist in der Ausgabe 270 des englischen retro*GAMER-Magazins erschienen und befasst sich etwa auch mit der Werbespiel-Situation in Spanien, Portugal und Italien.
Da nun bereits das neue Heft der retro*GAMER erschienen ist, lade ich hier die Antworten hoch, die ich Gerli im Rahmen seines E-Mail-Interviews gegeben habe. Ein äußerst spannendes Thema, zu dem noch einiges an Forschung zu leisten ist.
When do you think the first advergames were released in Germany?
As far as I know the first 'Werbespiele' were developed at the beginning of the 1990s. Capitalism had won the cold war and advertising budgets were on the rise. And after reunification, Germany was the largest market in the whole of Europe. At the same time, game development studios in Germany were going through tough times, because the Amiga - which was still the preferred platform for gaming - began to fade out, even hits were seldom profitable because of piracy and the department store chains started to demand their money back for unsold units. There was almost no money left in game production. So being paid upfront for an advergame was an offer they couldn't refuse.
How come the country has such a strong relationship with the overall genre and theme of games used to sell cigarettes or banking services, meat snacks or even Knorr-related products with that weird Abenteuer Atlantis?
Given the fact that The Ford Simulator (1987) was one of the first very successful advergames, I guess the German marketing and advertising agencies very much noticed. It was the heyday of the IBM-PC in Germany. So with one game on one platform only you could reach a lot of people, gamers and non-gamers alike. Germans were very fond of free or very cheap games, be it freeware, shareware, demos or even advergames, which were often included as supplements on the CDs of the very popular games magazines. And with piracy as a common practice, sharing these games was not only not a problem, it was encouraged.
This business model proved to be quite successful, so that in the early 90s several development studios specialized in advergames. With these professional production pipelines getting your "individual" advergame for a reasonable budget was only a matter of weeks or month. But it wasn't just commercial advertisers who wanted to use the medium for their purposes. Many contracts came from public institutions, political parties, ministries or even the German armed forces. The transition to games with a political message is fluid. However, this led to a lot of demand for such services.
How many advergames would you say were released in the country through the 80s/90s and are they still being released today?
That's actually hard to say. A few collectors have made it their mission to collect these games, but many advergames never got much publicity. There are probably between 300 and 400 games, many of them from the first half of the 1990s. Advergames continued to appear after that, but the first big wave was over. There was actually a second wave, beginning 1999 with the success of the game Mohrhuhnjagd for Johnnie Walker. This game was everywhere, although it was a very simple, hence well made shooting gallery. So advergames got a lot of attention again. But these games were a lot less ambitious.
Still, cross-media was all the rage, so a lot of what was known as advergames transformed into media-tie-ins, especially with television, or smaller Flash-games for Internet-marketing. But at the beginning of the 21st century many of the good conditions for advergames slowly but surely came to an end. With the breakdown of the New Economy, advertising budgets shrunk and the agencies lost interest in costly experiments. And with the rising costs of game development in general, the business model was never again as favorable as in the early 1990s.
Anyway, Advergames and their conditions of production had a big impact on the mindset of developers in Germany. So in the 2000s - very early on - their focus shifted to browser games and free-2-play. In this sense they never went away...
What's your favorite advergame and what is the weirdest in your opinion?
Like everyone else at the time I spend some fun hours playing Mohrhuhnjagd. But the game that made the biggest impression was Dunkle Schatten from 1994, an adventure game financed by the interior ministry, dealing with racism, xenophobia and fatal impact of neo-Nazism on local communities. It was a heavy subject for a computer game and that made it special.
Also from the world of adventures with a political background is Captain Gysi und das Raumschiff Bonn from 1997. This game is completely weird, but also shows how popular advergames were as a medium in Germany. Germany's left-wing party decided to make its perhaps most popular politician Gregor Gysi the hero of a kind of Space Quest. And at the time, that was an idea that was perfectly reasonable.
Der vollständige Artikel findet sich hier: Damiano Gerli: How Advergames Conquered Europe. In: retro*GAMER, The Essential Guide to Classical Games, Issue 270, 13.03.2025, S. 74-77.
PS Wie schon in Winnie Forsters Rezension des Ausstellungskatalogs Game Designers & Software Artists werde ich auch in diesem Artikel etwas voreilig als "Professor" bezeichnet. Das ist natürlich schmeichelhaft, aber leider falsch. Weder habe ich gerade, noch hatte ich jemals eine Professur an einer Hochschule inne.