If you spent a lot of time online as a kid or teenager, you probably remember the whole rickroll craze. It was a harmless but wildly popular prank built around tricking people into clicking a link that secretly led to Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up. Plenty of companies rode that wave, but Electronic Arts took the idea in a stranger direction while promoting Dante’s Inferno.

Months before the infernal hack-and-slash title launched, EA rolled out a nine-month marketing push built around the nine circles of Hell from Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. One part of that campaign, specifically the one tied to Wrath, only really worked if it managed to annoy the recipient first – which is exactly where the rickroll element came in.

An Endless Song and a Box to Smash

As Veronica Belmont showed on her YouTube channel, EA mailed a wooden box to a number of video game bloggers and journalists. It was not a normal press package filled with references to the Visceral Games title, but a plain chest that immediately began looping Never Gonna Give You Up. There were no buttons, no switches, and no obvious way to stop it. The only clue was a message carved into the lid: “The fifth circle of Hell is near.”

The package also came with a hammer and a pair of safety goggles. At that point, the message was pretty hard to miss: if you wanted the song to stop, you had to break the box open. That left bloggers and journalists with only one real option – grab the tool and start smashing through the wooden slats until they could find the mechanism that was forcing Rick Astley’s voice to keep playing. As you would expect, that took a decent amount of effort.

Once that bizarre little ordeal was over, the box revealed a letter that not only referenced Dante’s Inferno, but also made EA’s intention with the whole stunt crystal clear. The message read: “The sin of Wrath is yours. You have succumbed to rage and opened an infernal spring that boils with dark waters. Unchecked, your rage bred wrath. The waters have risen uncontrollably and you will drown in a pestilent mire. Go to hell.” That last line was also one of the slogans most closely tied to the Visceral Games release.

A Promotion with Ups and Downs

Although the rickroll box became the strangest and most memorable piece of the entire Dante’s Inferno campaign, EA had other plans for the remaining circles of Hell as well. The team offered a $6.66 discount to anyone who pre-ordered the hack-and-slash game at GameStop on September 9, 2009, or 9/9/9, and it even staged Christian protests “against the game’s release.” Ironically, that last move drew genuine backlash from bloggers, who described it as an “anti-Christian trick.”

EA eventually ran into trouble because of some of the weirder ideas surrounding the promotion. As ABC News later recalled, the Lust-themed push at Comic-Con invited attendees to take photos with women whom Electronic Arts described as “booth babes.” That move triggered a wave of criticism aimed at the company, helped popularize the hashtag #EAFail on Twitter, and ultimately pushed the developers into issuing an apology.

And what about Dante’s Inferno itself? While EA clearly managed to attract attention from both gamers and non-gamers with all of these marketing stunts, the title also stood on its own thanks to its hack-and-slash gameplay and its depiction of Hell, even if it was not spared criticism over repetitive mechanics. What seems undeniable, though, is that Electronic Arts made sure the game left a mark – whether through a wooden box screaming Never Gonna Give You Up or through the rest of a promotional campaign that was just as noisy, calculated, and impossible to ignore.

Source: 3DJuegos