In Real Life

Promoting the release of Red Faction Guerrilla in London, THQ yesterday packed a car with 100 copies of the game, chained a sledgehammer to it, and let nature take its course.

Sounds like a completely appropriate and amazingly creative way to promotion the new Red Faction game, in which smashing things with a sledgehammer accounts for a vast majority of the fun to be had. Over the course of the day, hundreds of passers-by took up arms against the innocent vehicle, many walking away with copies of the game for the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, while many just felt like beating a car to death. THQ PR manager Simon Watts explains.

“Because Red Faction Guerrilla features the world’s most realistic destruction engine, we thought that it would make for an interesting experiment to find out how many people, going about their everyday business, would stop in a busy city street to work out some stress by smashing their way into a car to earn a copy of the brand new game.”

Brilliant. If there’s one thing missing from my day-to-day life, it’s opportunities to hit things with sledgehammers. I shall have to rectify that.