Sex sells. We’re inundated by messages in all sorts of media: music; television; movies.

When you say sex, do you mean intercourse? Playa like me don’t need to pay for that; I get my porn for free!

No, that’s not what we mean. Think Traci Bingham in a PETA commercial:


(Image courtesy of PETA.)

How many ad campaigns can you think of that use sex to sell? How about body spray? Or sandwiches? Or... video games ?

If Rockstar can effectively use sex in their games, why can’t we? Lead developer Ichiro Lambe was initially worried that his mom might play the game, but what the hell? Feeling adventurous, we were convinced that AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! -- A Reckless Disregard for Gravity needed to be sexy. It was just a question of how.

MC-Hammer-style parachute pants and a wing suit are simply not sexy, so how should we add sex to base jumping? We took a look at how Burger King made little burgers sexy. For starters, there was pretty much zero connection between the product and the sexual component. So, in our game, the ads didn’t have to be about the pants. Ironically, there were actually quite a few very sexy pants commercials. Guess had Anna Nicole Smith, and a Google search for "sexy denim advertisements" turned up no dearth of sexy denim advertisements: http://images.google.com/images?q=sexy+denim+advertisements

We wanted to poke fun at this concept, so we invented the fictional jeans company, "DzjankKo Elefant," that followed in their footsteps.

Their concept:

We show you a sexy woman.

Their Slogan:

You’ll buy whatever we’re selling.

We then created the ad. Here is the process we used:

1. Snap shots of a model.

We love photo shoots. But since this was just an alpha test, we could use images from Morguefile, a wonderful photo resource. We started with this:



2. Crop, crop, and crop.

We cropped that down to what the jeans company wanted to focus on:



3. Jem and the... Holograms!

Truly, truly, truly outrageous! All the ads in the game are holographic in nature. We overlayed scanlines, saturate, and increased the contrast to convey a projected look:

4. Human Textuality

What makes a good ad? It has to grab your attention. Check! It has to give you a call to action or subconsciously make you want to do something. In this case: buy these jeans, and you will be this girl -- or, if you’re a guy, you’ll get this girl. In general it should be memorable. We hope that some of you will go to your local Bloomingdales in search of the perfect butt hugging Elefant:



Et voila! We applied this process to multiple ads, and created raw sprites ready for use within the game:





Satire and sex all in one. Will you buy DzjankKo Elefant jeans, or will you boycott them?