His role in the advertisements is to appear with Pepsi to thirsty people or people craving soda. Pepsiman is an official Pepsi mascot from Pepsi's Japanese corporate branch, created sometime around the mid-1990s. "Six of the best product placements in video games".
Handbook of Research on Digital Media and Advertising: User Generated Content Consumption: User Generated Content Consumption. "PC Users Gobble Up Pac-Man, Classic Games".
PC Format felt the marketing was smart, comparing it to The Apprentice. The Guardian included it in its list of the best product placement video games, similarly noting it as an early example of this and a "mischievous" marketing attempt. Eastin notes it as an early example of an advergame–an advertisement game–and discussed how it was more an attack on a competitor than an advertisement by the company who had it made. Pepsi Invaders has been mistakenly labelled Coke Wins and Coke Invaders, to the confusion of Omarzu. The intent was to boost the morale of Coca-Cola's employees, but most of the cartridges were discarded by their recipients. ĭue to the original Space Invaders Atari 2600 developer Rick Maurer leaving Atari over payment issues, Atari tasked designer Christopher Omarzu with hacking the original. The game was packaged in a black cartridge without a label. as a modification of the original Space Invaders cartridge. It was commissioned by The Coca-Cola Company to be handed out to 125 executives at their 1983 sales convention with an Atari 2600 console. The player's final score can be seen in the attract mode after the game ends. When the time runs out, all invaders and UFOs disappear, the score changes to the word "WINS" (thus making the row read "COKE WINS!", and the player cannon and all texts and the player cannon flash rapidly. The player cannon now features two bands of the same brown color.ĭuring the last 10 seconds, the timer and cannon limit indicators blink. An additional band of the same color frames the score at the top, with the word COKE prominently displayed to the left of the score. A timer was added, displayed on the ground, which itself has been changed to a Coca-Cola like brown color.
The UFO was changed to look like a flattened Pepsi logo in brand colors. The letters move up and down as they march but do not otherwise animate.
Primary graphic changes affected the invaders, each row of which consists of the letters P E P S I followed by a single alien, instead of the original six aliens per row. It is therefore impossible to lose the game. If any invaders successful traverse the lowest row, instead of the formation dropping to the ground and ending the game, it merely moves left and right until all the lowest row invaders are destroyed. Instead of having limited lives and no time limit as in the original, Pepsi Invaders has unlimited lives and a three-minute time limit to complete as many levels as possible. The game is a modification of Space Invaders, with nearly identical gameplay, but with a number of tweaks.