It was in the late 90s and early 2000s when Sony It surprised the audience with really peculiar ads, whether showing what PlayStation 9 will be like or the disturbing claim of the one known as alien girl. Each of these campaigns had a great impact on the public and one of the best came in 2011 during the last moments of life of PS3.
The Sony console was already looking towards retirement, since in just two years the generational leap would arrive with PS4. At that time, Sony’s North American division decided to create an advertising campaign called Long Live Play, which was launched on October 5 of that year. It was conceived as a “tribute to gamers from all walks of life and recognizes you for making PlayStation what we are today”, pointed out Scott Steinberg, vice president of product marketing.
Over 132 seconds, the footage shows a string of legendary characters from the brand, but with the particularity that Sony hired a handful of actors to represent them in real life. In this way, we can see Kratos, Nathan Drake, Solid Snake, Isaac Clark, Cole MacGrath, Lightning or Agent 47 throughout the scene. Here you have the full announcement.
Two soldiers walk through a forest after having landed spectacularly with their parachutes, which leads us to think that we are in the middle of a war. After advancing a little further, they come across an inn which they enter without questioning too much what is happening. There things start to get strange, as we see a cerberus and futuristic weapons, but both recruits pay the entrance fee, leave their rifles and enter the main room to run into the entire PlayStation universe.
Each of the characters is chatting at the bar or at different tables about their adventures. For example, Drake refers to his journey through the desert in Uncharted 3, while the protagonist of Metal Gear Solid 4 refers to how “the boy” is responsible for him doing some kind of good. While Sweet Tooth plays a game of chess with a Sackboy – at the same time Chell de Portal appears in the background – the goddess Athena makes a speech about how “he” was the only mortal to stand up to Zeus.
It is at that moment when one of the soldiers who star in the advertisement takes the floor to remember what happened in the Omaha Beach during World War II. He ends up referring to Michael, which causes all the characters to raise their voices calling out his name and that is when the bartender reveals the truth.
Michael is a real person, a player to whom each of the protagonists of the franchises are grateful for having helped them go further in their adventures. A photo of him holding a PS3 DualShock 3 is placed on the wall to discover that there are many other user snapshots, but Michael’s was not chosen at random. Sony held a contest where they asked for photos along with a text in which, in 30 words or less, each person was described as the best player on the platform.
Among the thousands of responses, a dozen were selected, which can be seen during the final moments. The Mill was the company in charge of bringing this ad to life, which was directed by Simon McQuoid, who later became director of the live action film of Mortal Kombat in 2021. Obviously, Bringing the entire conclave of protagonists to reality was not an easy task.as recognized by John Leonti, 3D visual effects supervisor.
“The biggest challenge was translating the 3D characters from the game into the ‘real’ world so that they lived in the environment in which they were filmed but remained faithful to their characters in the game. There was a lot of back and forth with the game developers to get everyone “The details were right. Players are very critical of anything that portrays the characters they love.”
VFX supervisor Phil Crowe revealed that “one of the most difficult shots was make Kratos look like he was ten feet tall, when in reality he was a normal guy. We worked closely with Simon to plan the shots so that this effect could be achieved without problems. And a similar technique was used to increase the size of Little Sister’s head.”
One of the plus points for English-speaking audiences is that each of the performances featured the voice of its original dubbing actor, which added greater fidelity. These are all the ones that appear:
All of them make up a sequence that has other more hidden hints, but that can be seen with your eyes wide open. We can see Chimera’s eyes at the bottom of the forest, the ice cream truck Twisted Metal outside the inn, the Mk.II wrote Otacon next to the cerberus, a PlayStation logo above the reception, as well as PaRappa the Rapper to the right of the receptionist.
There is also a score bubble Little Big Planet in the bowl in which the soldiers leave the money, Lightning’s Burning Blade and Ratchet’s Omnikey among the rest of the weapons, some of them belonging to the saga Killzone. A constant string of winks that conquered the players almost 13 years ago and that remains in the memory of many.
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