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The marketing is the game

Following the success of ilovebees.com, video game companies have been getting more creative with their viral marketing.

Valve has just released The Orange Box, a package of several shorter games and expansions to their smash hit Half-Life 2. Funny, well-produced teaser videos for the games Team Fortress 2 and Portal showed up on YouTube more than a year before the games were released.

For Portal, Valve also produced a Flash-based website, www.aperturescience.com. The visitor sees only a simple command-line prompt. This will seem like a pointless frustration to some people and a challenge to others, reminiscent of text-based adventure games from the early days of home PCs. Once you figure out how to log in, you find an application that, like the TF2 trailers, reveals more about the humor and atmosphere of the game than the gameplay.

While playing the actual game, I discovered an admin login scrawled on a wall, which sent me back to the website. That’s effective viral marketing. And considering the simple technology required for the website, the time and effort investment should really pay off for Valve. Of course, it helps to also have a high quality product.