Product placement and gaming: name a worse combo.

Marketing campaigns are a funny thing. Their money-grubbing tendrils can pull the most unexpected of mediums together in hilarious ways, and there’s a word for this: product placement. Sometimes, it can be subtle. When Superman crashed into a Sears department store in Man of Steel, you probably didn’t realise that the root cause of all that destruction was a $170 million ad deal. Other times, it can be a lot more difficult to ignore, like when James Bond forgot about his decades-old affinity for martinis thanks to a $45 million deal with Heineken.

And lest you think otherwise, the games industry is not impervious to this level of backdoor palm-greasing either. In fact, games are notorious for their constant brand crossovers. Not only do games cross over with other games all the time for the sake of publicity (just look at Fortnite!), but companies utterly detached from the industry will still use gaming to market their content for new audiences. Gaming is far-reaching enough to accommodate even the most bizarre collaborations, from the sandbox game Roblox featuring concerts by Lil Nas X to Butterfingers stickers popping up all over the Overwatch League.

Sometimes, these collaborations just fade into the background once they’re gone - briefly amusing, but ultimately unimpactful events that gamers never have to think about again. Unfortunately, there also exist a few collaborations that we wish we could forget, but never seem to be able to. Here are 10 of the strangest gaming collaborations that never should have happened:

Mountain Dew x Death Stranding

There’s a lot of weirdness in Death Stranding, and for the most part, we embrace it. Killing shadowy demons with bottles of human excrement? Sure. Fighting giant lions made out of tar with bazookas? I don’t see why not. Including The Game Awards host Geoff Keighley in a sidequest that depicts him as a literal fanboy of Hideo Kojima’s work? I’ll give that a pass too, but I draw the line at this game’s unhinged product placement. Thankfully, most of this marketing weirdness is limited to when players visit Sam’s base - where he goes to sleep and showers in between missions.

While you’re in the base however, you’ll notice that Sam has multiple cans of Monster Dew conspicuously-placed on his table which he can chug down for buffs. Sam’s bathroom also routinely plays ads for Ride With Norman Reedus, a lifestyle TV series fronted by the titular actor who also plays Sam. However, it only does this when you use the bathroom to poop. Hideo Kojima, I have… questions.

Sonic the Hedgehog's furry Xbox controllers

One of the weirdest Sonic collaborations gamers have been subjected to in recent years didn’t even have to do with a videogame. Xbox collaborated with Sonic the Hedgehog 2, the live-action movie featuring Knuckles, Sonic and Tails teaming up, to produce a series of furry controllers. I repeat: furry controllers. If you’ve ever had fantasies of gently caressing Sonic while blasting enemies away in Resident Evil 4, these controllers were designed with your very specific needs in mind.

And somehow, this is still just the second-weirdest Sonic collab on this list.

Call of Duty Warzone x Godzilla vs. Kong

Call of Duty games typically take a few months after launch to get really silly, but this crossover was on another level than the usual fare. Godzilla vs. Kong released in theaters in March 2021 to some fairly decent box office returns, and Warzone doubled down on that success by doing a massive in-game crossover… more than a year later. The crossover itself was a lot of fun: we got to drop into Warzone’s map and watch two kaiju duke it out in real-time, impacting the map with every major blow - but the whole thing came a year after everyone had gotten over the movie it was based on. Better late than never, I guess?

Balenciaga x Fortnite

While we usually see other brands drop into Fortnite’s battle royale mode during collabs, the opposite took place here. Renowned clothing and luxury brand Balenciaga partnered up with Epic Games to create a clothing line themed after Fortnite, including accessories and apparel. That’s not the outrageous bit, of course - Uniqlo did the exact same thing a while later. What’s outrageous are these prices! Balenciaga sold Fortnite hats for $395 and hoodies for $725 and somehow, people actually bought them. The venn diagram of Fortnite players and high fashion enthusiasts is larger than you think.

Sonic Forces x Hooters

Few franchises have transitioned from 2D gameplay to 3D as poorly as Sonic the Hedgehog. 2017’s Sonic Forces was lambasted by critics and fans alike upon its release, mostly due to its repetitive gameplay and unoriginal platforming. To Sega’s credit, the publisher did everything it could to make the game a success - including a strange collaboration with American restaurant chain Hooters. Hooters is infamous for its waiting staff, which primarily comprises young women whose sex appeal is played up to sell chicken wings.

It’s not exactly the kind of marketing deal you would expect from Sonic the Hedgehog, to say the least. The promotion involve several Hooters restaurants in Tokyo and ended up being fairly unremarkable. Hooters introduced a special Sonic-themed menu, put up some cardboard cutouts of Sonic and friends around the stores, and strung up some grim-looking Sonic plushies. Even Sonic doesn’t look happy about this.

Martin Luther King x Fortnite

Good intentions don’t always result in good ideas. Take Fortnite’s collaboration with TIME Studios for a Martin Luther King Jr.-themed special event called March Through Time. The event took place in Fortnite’s creative mode and allowed players to learn about Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights teachings, and important events from American history that he was involved in. Tonally, the event itself wasn’t the problem - the platform was to blame here.

Fortnite is a deeply unserious videogame. Master Chief can swing a Lightsaber at Rick Sanchez in the Daily Bugle, and players won’t bat an eye because this level of IP-sharing has been the in-game norm for a very long time. However, when you put all these silly skins, whacky emotes and trigger-happy players into an event as solemn as this, you take away from the lesson it’s trying to teach. There’s a real difference between walking into a museum to learn about history, and booting up Fortnite to get a free event spray.

Pizza Hut x EverQuest 2

EverQuest 2 wasn’t just a pioneer in the MMORPG genre, but in turning videogames into pizza delivery platforms too. Following a marketing deal with Pizza Hut, players could use the online game to get pizzas delivered right on their doorstep without making so much as a phone call. All you had to do was type in the command ‘/pizza’ and the game would launch an online browser with the Pizza Hut page opened up.

One could argue that you could do the same by just opening a web browser yourself, but where’s the fun (and ad dollars) in that?

Diablo 4 x Milan Fashion Week

Milan Fashion Week saw a provocative collaboration with Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo 4. Now, we’re cheating a bit with this collab because it was actually pretty cool. Danish fashion house Han Kjøbenhavn designed a Chtonic Penumbra collection based on the action-RPG and presented it as a high-concept journey through the works of creative director Jannik Wikkelsø Davidsen.

One of Diablo 4’s most striking features is its art design. The world of Sanctuary drips with gore and menace wherever you go, and part of that is down to how well Blizzard has nailed these hellish visuals. Some of the clothes we saw presented via the Chthonic Penumbra collection do the game plenty of justice, with red dresses, coats and headdresses inspired by Lilith herself.

League of Legends x Louis Vuitton

League of Legends is an incredibly popular MOBA with a thriving esports scene, so it shouldn’t be surprising that the game has seen its fair share of marketing collaborations. One of these partnerships happened to be with renowned French luxury fashion brand Louis Vuitton, resulting in an entire collection themed after the League of Legends World Championship held in Paris, France that year.

This clothing line didn’t quite spark joy for us, however. While a few of these pieces - such as the parka and Qiyana tee - aren’t too shabby, the rest either feel too gaudy or too generic for a League of Legends collab. The Bubble Skirt doesn’t really scream League of Legends, making it a questionable inclusion in this lineup. The biggest factor working against this clothing line is its unfortunate pricing. $1060 platforms? $485 pocket squares? $940 cycling shorts? At this point, you’d have to win Worlds just to pick up one of these parkas.

Subway x Nathan Drake

As far as product placement in videogames go, this was pretty shameless. Naughty Dog’s adventure game franchise Uncharted scored a marketing deal with Subway for the release of Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. As in, sandwich seller Subway. If this deal had been limited to the silly ad above, that would be one thing, but Subway’s bread-slinging products managed to worm their way into the actual game too.

Nathan Drake got a Subway skin for Uncharted 3’s multiplayer, and players got a Five Dollar Footlong taunt to use during in-game matches. Imagine getting shot down by a player, and then watching that player taunt you with a Subway emote while you mash buttons waiting to respawn. You'll never be so hungry or angry, which is probably exactly what Subway was going for.

10 bizarre gaming collaborations that never should have happened