Blooming megacorps, making us buy stuff and lining the streets with colgate adverts. What buggers. But if you can’t beat ‘em – and you definitely can’t – then you might as well join them. And now you can do exactly that, but your soul and ability to look at yourself in the mirror will remain, because it’s only a game.
VoxelStorm’s AdvertCity is a cyberpunk advertising tycoon game set in an evolving, procedurally generated city (the meatspace) and its digital counterpart (cyberspace). The goal: advertise for the megacorps and make lots of cold, hard dosh.
The city – a grey, featureless mass of towers and roads – expands depending on what you advertise. Get it to grow quickly by plugging construction megacorps or exploit the misery of big city life by advertising escapes like booze and entertainment.
Gaining rep with different megacorps unlocks new technologies, so you can go from plastering posters and billboards all over the physical city, creating bright spots of colour, to beaming ads directly into brains. So it’s not unlike what everyone thinks Facebook is planning with Oculus.
VoxelStorm are Kickstarting the game, asking for a measly £1,200 – and wouldn’t you know, they’ve already surpassed it. Colour me excited. But also scared about the concept of shooting ads into people’s retinas.