I have an unhealthy fascination with advergames. Well, advertising in general, but advertising has gotten so boring since we started expecting companies to tell the truth and not try to kill us too blatantly. Advertising games in general aren’t super common anymore, usually relegated to browser or mobile platforms.
It’s not that I expect them to be good. Outside of a few exceptions, they’re usually not. At the very best, they’re inoffensive, but at worst, we have Mr. Pibb. Otherwise known as Mr. Pibb: The 3D Interactive Game. It might potentially be the worst first-person shooter I’ve ever played, but to truly confirm that, I’d have to delve through the fog of repressed trauma, and I don’t think it’s worth it.
The brand that failed medical school
Mr. Pibb is essentially Coca-Cola’s version of Dr. Pepper. Or it was. It’s now sold as Pibb Xtra. I don’t think it was ever really sold here in Canada, or if it was, it was like Mello Yello in that it was only briefly marketed here.
For a short while – and this is all stuff I’m essentially learning right now – it was marketed using a character with the obvious name of Mr. Pibb. I’m curious to look up an old commercial, but I’ve heard his voice enough playing through this game, and I really don’t want to subject myself to it any further.
Released in 1998 it is, as far as I can find, the first game created by Brand Games, a company that is still around today. Unsurprisingly, their current webpage makes no mention of Mr. Pibb or even having worked with Coca-Cola, so I’m very happy to highlight their past abomination. Among their PC titles, they also created advergames for Taco Bell and Gap Kids, both of which are a bit more hilarious, but I decided to go chronologically here.
The mascot in my brain
Mr. Pibb was built on the ACKNEX Engine, which is now better known as 3D Gamebuilder. It’s awful. It feels like it kind of belongs between Doom and Duke Nukem 3D’s build engine. There are moments of clever mathplay in the engine, like a single bridge across a room or sections where you go underwater. However, I imagine this is built into the engine since the game design is otherwise, uh, rough. I don’t have much faith in the technical side of the development team, is what I’m saying.
Apparently, your school was taken over by a mad scientist and everyone was turned into zombies. Everyone except you and Mr. Pibb, who I guess lives in your head. You cure people from their zombification by burping at them. I guess that carbonated beverages make you burp, so that’s your weapon. That sort of sounds like something someone would bring up as a joke in a brainstorming meeting. It truly stretches the meaning of the phrase “There are no bad ideas.”
Beyond the gassy main character, the only other real link to the soft drink that I know of is its presence in the game as a health pick-up. Of course you gain health by grabbing a tall glass of Mr. Pibb. And each time you do, the eponymous character will scream at you the typical ‘90s-sounding slogan of “Put it in your head!” It’s really, um, unique.
Yep, that’s a school
If there’s one thing that Mr. Pibb does well, it’s in its environment. The school looks like a school, which sounds really bare minimum, but environments that actually look similar to the real world weren’t really guaranteed in 1998.
However, the level design is hardly suitable for some of Mr. Pibb’s eccentricities. Enemies, for example, can’t just be passed through. You’ll always collide with them, which isn’t necessarily unusual. However, once you cure them of their zombieism, they still just stand there, unwilling to give ground. There are a lot of choke points like doorways, and there were a number of occasions where I was alternating between jumping and ducking to try and get past someone.
You can burp at them, but that just makes them sass at you and causes you to take damage. It’s not ideal.
On the plus side, however, the whole game is just one big(ish) level. It took me 45 minutes to complete the whole game, and that includes time spent getting stuck behind immovable students and dying in the worst platforming section imaginable at the end of the game. Your main objective is to gather keys to get to new areas in the school. It’s not very unique.
Eeeew, it’s sticky!
Even at 45 minutes, I can’t believe I went to the effort of completing Mr. Pibb. The last section of the game is somewhat obtuse and entirely created to be as frustrating as possible. You have to traverse caustic slime using moving platforms, and every time you step onto one of them, Mr. Pibb exclaims, “Eeeew, it’s sticky!” This is regardless of whether or not you actually touch the slime.
If you do slip off a platform – and that’s extremely easy to do – there’s a good chance that you won’t recover and will just die. I made slow progress through the final stretch of the game. I heard “Eeeew, it’s sticky!” so many times that my husband screamed out from the bathroom how much he hated that “kid.”
It doesn’t help that the same awful song loops for the entirety of the game. The only time this changes is during the final boss battle. However, it just plays a tune over top of the existing music, and I swear that it is one of the worst compositions I’ve ever heard in a video game.
Picture this: You’re in a store that sells musical instruments. Someone has left their child unattended. This child is walking around the keyboard section, mashing keys. That’s what the celebratory ending song sounds like. It’s like the composer had left on vacation, and they really needed someone to fill in before the deadline. So, one of the programmers, with no musical knowledge, tried their best. It’s incredible.
Advertrauma
The only thing that kept me playing Mr. Pibb was my constant amusement at how badly designed it was. Not that it surprises me that a game based on a drink that is 90% high-fructose corn syrup is not very good. It’s most shocking when an advergame turns out to be decent, like in the case of Cool Spot. It’s hard to tap into someone’s passion when you tell them their objective is to sell sugar-water.
At the same time, there was a certain value to advergames in the ‘90s. You may think that it’s an incredibly bad idea to chain your product to a horrible experience, but as a child in the ‘90s, we’d basically play whatever we could get our hands on. These days, you can really stretch your dollar and get thousands of games for less than $5, or even for free, but in the formative days of the internet, it wasn’t so simple.
If you gave a ‘90s kid a free game, it’s almost certain that they would play it. Once they’ve played it, you’ve managed to put Mr. Pibb in their head. And that’s the sort of trauma that can only be dislodged with expensive therapy that children can’t afford.
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