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Games Entertainment

Nintendo Hires Walking Gamers 289

Posted by CmdrTaco from the he's-got-style-he's-got-flash dept.
Plug1 writes "CNN.com has an interesting article about nintendo hiring people to offer free samples of their games. Stephen Pellitier "will wear a 15-inch flat-screen TV on his chest and a pack of batteries on his back. With a game console and joysticks dangling from his waist, he will spend his weekends inviting passers-by to play games."" imagine the possible pickup lines involving joysticks, buttons, and playing with them! The potential for being beaten on the streets is just amazing!
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Nintendo Hires Walking Gamers More

Nintendo Hires Walking Gamers

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  • there goes the 'kiddy system' argument (Score:3, Funny)

    by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Tuesday July 09, 2002 @05:02PM (#3852417) Homepage
    After all, grab the wrong joystick at this kiosk, and you could end up in a very adult situation!

  • Beaten on the streets... (Score:3, Funny)

    by ralian ( 127441 ) on Tuesday July 09, 2002 @05:03PM (#3852424) Homepage
    Dude, this guy's probably spent so many years honing his 1337 sk1llz on Street Fighter that he could take any punk ass that tries to take him down... or at least, he thinks he can... ;)
    • By this logic I should be the greatest skateboarder, soldier, knight, pilot, plumber, vampire hunter, hedgehog, motocross champion, fighting robot, burger chef, magician, cop, car thief and race car driver that ever lived.

  • Drug dealers do this !!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kasmiur ( 464127 ) on Tuesday July 09, 2002 @05:04PM (#3852432)
    They get kids to sell to other kids. Now apperently Nintendo are taking this route. Whats next offering the first game free?
    • they all ready do, there are always deals where u get a free game when u buy the system
    • Nintendo has had this concept working for years now; it's called Pokemon the trading card game. Kids hook other kids... it's like magic! Of course card games are just a way of returning to their roots, a kind of corporate return to innocence. Of course, the fact that they're just playing on the addictive nature of trading card games and children's lack of self-control kind of negates the whole innocence effect.
  • ... at darwinawards.com.

  • Nice target (Score:3, Funny)

    by The Turd Report ( 527733 ) <the_turd_report@hotmail.com> on Tuesday July 09, 2002 @05:04PM (#3852439) Homepage Journal
    How long until some kids beat this guys ass and take the game? My bet is for less than a week.

    • How long until some kids beat this guys ass and take the game?

      Why not just steal the games from the store he's out in front of? Seems a lot easier.

    • Re:Nice target (Score:5, Funny)

      by teamhasnoi ( 554944 ) <teamhasnoi AT yahoo DOT com> on Tuesday July 09, 2002 @05:53PM (#3852845) Journal
      How long until someone beats up the kid, takes the game, throws it through the window of the store, sets the store and a marching band on fire, carjacks a car, runs drugs for a mob kingpin, researches the Republic to get Conscription, raises an army and invades Nebraska and the Temple of Nod? I'd say 15 min.

  • "I've programmed button #1 for rapid fire!" (Score:3, Funny)

    by Dr_Marvin_Monroe ( 550052 ) on Tuesday July 09, 2002 @05:05PM (#3852440)
    ...and the number one pick-up line.....

    "My joystick's been 'ruggedized' for exceptional durability and long lasting play!"

  • Dream (Score:3, Funny)

    by discstickers ( 547062 ) <chris AT discstickers DOT com> on Tuesday July 09, 2002 @05:05PM (#3852442) Homepage
    I'm sorry, but that's my dream job. I'd take near-minimum wage to have that job.

    • Re:Dream (Score:2, Funny)

      by Wakko Warner ( 324 )
      You've made my worst-signatures list. Congrats!

    • I'm sorry, but that's my dream job. I'd take near-minimum wage to have that job.
      Sadly, you can pretty much bet that these kids will be getting paid minimum wage.

      From the CNN article [cnn.com]:

      Now 24, he has landed his dream job... "I don't consider this work. Smiling and having fun with video games is just the best," he said. "How can you go wrong?"

      So, picture a chubby whale of a kid figuring the same thing about working for McDonalds on account of how much he likes burgers.

      An employee telling a corporation how much he loves his job is a bit like an altar boy telling a Catholic priest how much he likes to be spanked.

  • Monitor Inversion? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Cyno01 ( 573917 ) <Cyno01@hotmail.com> on Tuesday July 09, 2002 @05:06PM (#3852453) Homepage
    Will the guy be able to invert the monitor so if he gets bored he can play himself?
    • Will the guy be able to invert the monitor so if he gets bored he can play himself?
      He doesn't need the monitor to play with himself. Besides, eventually he'll go blind from it and won't be able to see the monitor anyway.
  • where he who shoots fastest gets the most rewards!

    --Huck

  • Did I just read that? (Score:5, Funny)

    by jcsehak ( 559709 ) on Tuesday July 09, 2002 @05:06PM (#3852456) Homepage
    The potential for being beaten on the streets is just amazing!

    must... get... mind... out... of... gutter...
  • quote:
    "With a game console and joysticks dangling from his waist."

    hah! what a great way for geeks like us to meet REALY HAWT chix0Rz!

    "scuse me, i'm having a problem with my joystick."
    "wanna play a game? grab hold!"
    "if you wanna donkey kong with me, yer gonna hafta play with the joystick."
  • ... that color LCD screens don't work outside. I think this is a clever ruse by a parents group to get their kids outside.
  • For six hours a day every Friday, Saturday and Sunday through mid-August, they'll solicit people to grab a joystick and play a few games

  • The Amazing Walking Bilboard (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Calimus ( 43046 ) <calimus@teBOYSEN ... .com minus berry> on Tuesday July 09, 2002 @05:08PM (#3852468) Homepage
    We all knew this was going to happen at some point. We are already a walking advertisements (nike hats, shoes, shirts, etc..) it's really about time in this day and age that human advertising machine became interactive.

    Think about the future this could bring, We advance from having a flat screen on the front and batteries on the back to an imbeded LCD/plasma screen in the chest and runs right off the electricity created by the brain. The games/advertisements are stored in the brain as well and just played back from memory.

    Who needs walls and signs when the human body could do it more efficiently.

    Of course, when this happens for real, I think it will be time to check myself out of the gene pool.

    • Re:The Amazing Walking Bilboard (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Tuesday July 09, 2002 @05:18PM (#3852592) Homepage
      The more this proliferates, the more people there will be like my friend, who's taken to removing logos from everything he wears - even gifts, etc.

      Remember the ying and yang - as this kind of thing becomes more popular, the counter-advertising culture will have to take _their_ campaign to a whole new level. This is what I'm most interested in seeing.
      • Your friend is a walking anti-advertisement advertisement! It's like anarchists who form an "anarchist party" or punks that say "Wearing a uniform is for robots" meanwhile, they are wearing a punk uniform. You are pretty much like everyone else, right down to your monkey DNA, get used to it.
        • Sure. What's so wrong with that? Seems like advertising for something you believe in is objectively better than advertising for a large corporation for free.
        • THe next time you see somebody with a shirt without a logo, stop and remember whether you think, "Hey, that guys must hate logos cause he's not wearing any."

          Chances are you won't. You cant advertise if there is no message on the creative. Duh.

    • Yes, the future of advertising, yesterday. People walking around wearing placards are as old as advertising, this just happens to be an interactive placard.

      "Think about the future this could bring, We advance from having a flat screen on the front and batteries on the back to an imbeded LCD/plasma screen in the chest and runs right off the electricity created by the brain. The games/advertisements are stored in the brain as well and just played back from memory."

      Yeah, but what will the screen show when he checks out that hot chick walking by? Memories of his first time? ;)

      BlackGriffen
      • No, because anyone who would have such a thing implanted has not gotten any, ever.
      • I want to see a photo of one of those guys wearing the sandwich board that says "Jesus is coming - repent whores of Babylon" playing a game on one of these walking nintendo stooges.

        No matter what anyone else says, walking with heavy batteries on your back dealing with the public all day is nasty-ass work for $100.

    • Who needs walls and signs when the human body could do it more efficiently.

      Of course, when this happens for real, I think it will be time to check myself out of the gene pool.
      You're going to sterilize yourself when salespeople become a reality? Wha?
    • We all knew this was going to happen at some point. We are already a walking advertisements (nike hats, shoes, shirts, etc..) it's really about time in this day and age that human advertising machine became interactive.

      Yeah, I read some story someplace about how in the future, newspapers will be sold by shouting children on street corners instead of those dumb old machines.

      (I, personally, could never spend six hours watching other people play gamecube at my expense. I'd have to take on all comers in a Super Monkey Ball deathmatch.)

  • bad pickup lines? (Score:1, Redundant)

    by sporty ( 27564 )
    "Hey baby, wann aplay with my joystick?"

    Sorry.. couldn't resist :)
  • And I've been doing it for so many years for free!

    Visit my website assmuffins.

    tcd004
  • Ya these guys better make sure they stay in the good areas... otherwise they'll get mugged and that gear stolen.

    Hell - I might even steal it.
  • Can only imagine all the germs on the controllers from snot nozed kids and pimply faced teenagers pawing them up all day. Maybe they'll have someone with Handywipes nearby.

    I'll stick to my own joystick, thank you very much...
    • I suppose you're one of those people that has to "disinfect" the seats at a restaruant before you sit down? Those joysticks should be no worse than your average store display joystick. Heck, I'd be surprised if they are any worse than your average public door. Relax, you have an immune system, let it do its job and worry about more important things.

  • Pick-Up Lines (Score:5, Funny)

    by akiy ( 56302 ) on Tuesday July 09, 2002 @05:10PM (#3852495) Homepage
    5. I'll make all your Final Fantasies come true.
    4. You sure set off my Chrono Trigger.
    3. Want to see what I can draw in Mario Paint?
    2. I'll be Link, and you can be my Zelda. ... and ...

    1. Want to play with my Mario?

    • 5. I'll make all your Final Fantasies come true.
      4. You sure set off my Chrono Trigger.
      3. Want to see what I can draw in Mario Paint?
      2. I'll be Link, and you can be my Zelda. ... and ...

      1. Want to play with my Mario?


      No, no.... even better...

      "Would you like to meet my little plumber?"

      Bill
  • I wouldn't try this approach with Quake III. People might get the wrong Idea.
  • Boy, do I feel sorry for these people. I used to work for a promotional marketing company (who would subcontract to do these kinds of promotions), and this is some of the hardest work you can imagine. People are downright MEAN to people who do this kind of work, and $100 a day would not be enough to get me to do it!

    You think being beat up is unrealistic? How about taking insults all day about how much cooler Dreamcast, xbox, is? How about the snotty kid who wants to play for hours? Good luck to these people, they will need it!!!
  • I'm in love with the girl pictured in that article. I can't imagine anyone wanting to beat up someone THAT good looking ;)
  • Some Mayberry cop might mistake the "walking game" for a "walking Palestinian suicide bomber". Sorry, Sheriff! All those wires and those controllers confused me!
  • Just curious but where do they plan on deploying these people to? I would be very amazed if a few or all dont get stolen within a few weeks. Think about it? A 200+ game console and battery walking around and all you gotta do is beatup the guy who has it and run......maybe I just look at the dark side....
  • to think ... i went to college.
  • Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those?

  • I don't know about you guys, but I can't wait to round-up my hoodlum friends and yank the whole kit off some unlucky PR monkey.

    ;)

  • Imagine what happens when someone loses a match of Super Smash Brothers Melee, and pulls on the controller cord in anger. Whee, there goes a gamecube & LCD screen, not to mention cuts and bruises ;)
  • Its like those annoying people on the streets wearing chicken costumes telling you to go into the restaurant..
    "come on man. play eternal darkness"
    'no!'
    "come on."
    'go away! oh god please go away'
  • ...completely and utterly stupid.

    It is silly. I don't think anyone would stoop so low as to become a walking game console stand...

    Every teen i know and their dog have at least one console, and don't expect to find someone walking on the streets, with a console on his head to find out about the latest gaming news.

    Who is this "idea" targeted at? My mother returning from the grocery store?

    On a lighter note, this scheme involves gamers ever getting OUT of their rooms...

    Go ahead, mod me as troll, but deep inside you you know that while games are fun, there's something to be said about self respect.
    __

  • National Exposure (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pudge_lightyear ( 313465 ) on Tuesday July 09, 2002 @05:20PM (#3852601) Homepage
    After the great dot.com bust and 9/11, advertising has gotten pretty tricky. I imagine that budgets are tight, media options are somewhat slimmer, etc.
    The neatest thing about this campaign is that sure...this may not work, but it made national news because it's a new idea.
    So...they spend a couple of hundred bucks to pay a few guys to walk around crowded areas on weekends. Pay a couple thousand on hardware...probably about 500 for each. And reap the (probably small benefits) associated with this campaign. But...the national exposure this should generate because of the fact that it's new and wierd would probably have costed hundreds to thousands of times what they spent on the few kids and units.

    • Re:National Exposure (Score:4, Insightful)

      by cancrman ( 24472 ) on Wednesday July 10, 2002 @01:36AM (#3854664) Homepage
      > I imagine that budgets are tight, media options are somewhat slimmer...

      If anything there are more choices for advertising media than ever. Been to a bar lately? Advertisments over urinals (I have seen GTA3 ads on these), postcards by the doors, coasters, swizzlesticks, matchbooks. It's all fair game these days. My company used cars wrapped in ads to get their message out. There is a company were you can lease models to hand out product samples.

      TV, radio, internet (banners, spam, popups), print (magazines, newspapers) outdoor, sponsorships, 'guerilla media' (Bars, wild postings, samplings, elevator LCDs, floor graphics), LCDs in checkout lines. Christ, even the divders in the supermarket checkout lines have ads on them.

      Advertising is becoming so commonplace and persistant that companies need something to differentiate themselves. Hence this new campaign by nintendo.

      It's fucking brilliant.

      I'm a media planner and I wish I had the opportunity to come up with this idea.

  • Nintendo's Street Team (Score:4, Informative)

    by Radnor ( 4434 ) on Tuesday July 09, 2002 @05:24PM (#3852633)
    The Street Team's website can be found here [nintendo.com]. They have people in LA, Boston, Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta, and Dallas.

  • Privacy Concerns? (Score:3, Funny)

    by anthony_dipierro ( 543308 ) on Tuesday July 09, 2002 @05:24PM (#3852639) Journal
    Doesn't anyone have concerns about Nintendo collecting information on how good of a game player they are? Sure, you say, you might have nothing to hide, but what about others that do?

  • Cool. (Score:2)

    by Soko ( 17987 )
    If this really catches on for marketing games, this guy [slashdot.org] has some hope of realizing his dream [classicgaming.com].

    Soko
  • About time those pasty kids got outside for a bit, although I'd think that the glare off of their faces would distract the players.

  • "Look At My Boobies"? [cnn.net]

    Looks like fun.

  • when all of these out of work .com'ers were going to get a chance to work again. ("Last you saw me I was burning through 40 million VC and had no product --- now I am walking throught the streets with an LCD around my neck and joysticks hooked to my waste....")

  • Slashdot 2012 (Score:3, Funny)

    by Patrick13 ( 223909 ) on Tuesday July 09, 2002 @06:12PM (#3852936) Homepage Journal
    Walking Video Game Class Action Suit Victory

    The 13 surviving "walking video game" employees had a major victory in court today when Dr. Robert E. Burdick [panelofconsultants.com], medical expert witness for the class action suit showed that the flat panel screens used to display the games on the "walking video game" employees actually exposed its wearers to 800 times the amount of radiation as would typically be used in a dental x-ray.

    Nintendo's [nintendo.com] defense panel had no comment, except to say that their medical expert would also be testifying as soon as his chemotherapy treatments permitted.

    In other news, the goatse.cx [216.239.51.100] troll is still actively spamming the slashdot comment boards.

  • Obligatory comment. (Score:3, Funny)

    by MongooseCN ( 139203 ) on Tuesday July 09, 2002 @06:36PM (#3853043) Homepage
    Hey baby want to push some of my buttons?
  • Please hire playboy playmates as walking gamers
  • I can just imagine the pictures in that CNN article: Kids walking around hunched over with strained faces trying to lug those whopping X-Boxes around all day. You'd see the occasional one on the ground being kicked by dorks in penguin T-shirts.
  • "The potential for being beaten on the streets is just amazing!"

    No shit. I'd beat up some nintendo smurf to get my hands on a large flatscreen version of the latest & greatest console.
  • They had booth babes wearing a similar getup (but without a 15" display) at the 2001 E3. Each girl had 4 (as I recall) GBAs strapped to her waist. Each unit was attached via a thin cable on a recoil mechanism so it snapped back into place.

    Judging by the looks on some of the girls' faces, I think they were equipped with geek-recoil mechanisms. There's nothing quite like being surrounded by four fat, smelly computer geeks playing games and staring at your tits! (Or so I'm told!)
  • Now I can play Street Fighter II Alpha blah blah on the actual *street*.
  • It was a lot of fun. Of course, that was back in the 16-Bit era, when Sega and Nintendo fought for supremacy and the Play Station was still concieved as the CD add on for the SNES. Basically, it involved standing in front of a kiosk at the mall (in this case inside a Captron store), handing out stickers and talking up the games. I also got to choose which games to display (although Nintendo preferred it if you gave preference to their own games. The Nintendo rep mentioned it when she noticed I liked to show off "Prince of Persia," but I was a big fan of that game at the time.). Oh, and I think I got whatever New Jersey's minimum wage was at the time, which was considerably less than $100 per day. (Still, my memory has started playing tricks on me with advancing age...)

    I did pretty well at it, and won a Mario Paint. (It was all location, Christmas time at one of the busiest malls in New Jersey.)

    Of course, this version of a Nintendo demostrator sounds like a real life rip off of the Sega game, "The Typing of the Dead." In that game, if you've never seen it, the Agents have Dreamcasts with big batteries attached to their back and Dreamcast keyboards in front as they kill off zombies with a well typed phrase. (Too bad "Typing of the Dead" isn't coming out, as far as I know, for Gamecube. They could package it with the keyboard peripheral they are supposed to release...)

    <wistful sigh> ... well, now I'm off to sleep (well, to watch an episode of Trigun and then sleep) I have to go to my boring Web $TITLE job tommorrow... Hope those kids enjoy their time as Nintendo demonstrators... </wistful sigh>

  • The first deployment of Mobile Nintendo Gaming Persons came to a sudden, terrifying halt today as they unloaded from their Suburban.

    A gang of uppity mimes armed with make believe billy clubs and pretend guns violently pantomimed through the vicious, grisly murders of each and every one of the Nintendo employees.

    Although no one was injured, the crystal-clear depiction of their own demise sent the Gaming crew into a deep, trance-like coma.

    "Obviously," said the police spokesman, "we are dealing with ninja mimes."
    ----
  • As I said, gamers don't walk, at least in my experience. They get driven in minivans. The older ones drive '86 Nissan Sentras with a big rusted-out hole where the floor used to be under the gas pedal.

    Any walking distance greater than that from the car to the mall tends to inspire panic and cardiac arrest.
  • I can imagine on the news some young kid with a TV strapped to him being shot at the airport because he was screaming the word "Bomberman" at the top of his lungs.

    Either that, or an angry mob of people'll hog tie the kid up with the controller wires he has hooked up to him.

  • imagine the possible pickup lines involving joysticks, buttons, and playing with them!

    Yeah, that's what gamers are known for - their clever pick-up lines. ROTFLMAO

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