This Is Why Marketing Departments Should Be Kept At Arm’s Length
One of the other pieces of interesting Ultima Forever’s history that Paul Barnett revealed in his GDC Online talk was that at one point, fairly early on in the project’s development, a rather absurd amount of money was spent by the marketing department to develop a concept for Ultima Forever’s logo. As you can see in the screen captures below, it was a…questionable effort:
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- First, you got this Avatar guy…
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- …and then this sorceress lady…
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- And somehow they both carve the logo out of the rock face.
Essentially, the Avatar kind of barges into the scene, and hews the word “Ultima” out of the rock face behind him. Then the sorceress lady pops in after he departs and zaps “Forever” into view. And then she pops out, and I think maybe they both reappear, and…honestly, it was just so bad to watch that I forget what happens next. And apparently this concept cost more to produce, according to Barnett, than had been spent on developing Ultima Forever to that point.
Which…yikes.
Mythic, for their part, decided they could do one better, and had one of their artists whip up what has since become the iconic logo for Ultima Forever. Producer Jeff Skalski added a bit of animation, and then someone figured out how to work the logo into the game’s title screen, and voila:
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- Initial logo…
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- …animated expand/explode…
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- …and a snazzy title screen!
Much better, no? Of course, the finished game will probably not have a title screen quite like this either, but still: there’s an argument to be made based on the above, I think, that an effective marketing team needs to actually work with the people making the product being marketed in developing an aesthetic for any ads, splash screens, logos, and suchlike. Or, better still, marketing should just be kept at arm’s length from any project, using its resources to work with and market content produced directly by the project team.
Oh, and as an added little bonus, let me present this image too:
When it was announced that Mythic was to be brought under the BioWare label, they added a BioWare logo splash screen to the startup sequence for their then-current builds of Ultima Forever. The startup screen featured a slightly…pixelated BioWare logo, which was accompanied by the startup chime from an Apple ][. A very cheeky bit of humour, although I gather that Mythic got in a bit of trouble for doing it (probably due to some silly copyright on the chime sound).
To be fair the whole “Rocky Mountain” logo doesn’t look so bad. It kinda remind be of the Interplay LOTR RPGs logo and it does have the proper Ultima font unlike the final one 😛
The whole Avatar and witch running arround is silly though.
I agree about it being silly, but my assumption was that they were both Avatars and the marketing department somehow forgot that we wouldn’t go monster-bashing while wearing a busty evening gown. 😉
Ok, I’m inferring a great deal here and am probably wrong on half of it.
The new Ultima logo is not classic Ultima. It has a DAoC sensibility that tells me this is now Mythic’s interpretation of Ultima. And that’s ok. It’s their baby now and they’ll put their imprint on the series. Because of their history I feel reasonably safe with a new interpretation.
EA marketing? That… monstrosity tells me every brain cell in their office is crammed with the imperative to beat Zynga. Beat Zynga. Beat Zynga!11!! They know the Farmville space and seem to conflate this with other “social” efforts what with the cutesy cellphone facebook look.
It also tells me they’re lazy and couldn’t be bothered to actually spend ten minutes researching the history and fanbase of single-player Ultima. They made absolutely no effort to connect and instead tried to cram the whole thing into their competitive imperatives and frame of reference. All while violating the marketing practice that unless you’re willing to do a full-court press to change perceptions (a’la Wii), you shall not preemptively piss off the fans that do remain. They create negativity and prevent the creation of the market you were hoping for. They assume Ultima is now so long gone that it’s a blank slate to impose whatever the big corporate directive is. And It’s thoughtless and it’s lazy.
And that reinforces my opinion of EA again. They’re not bad or evil. But the parts I see are really badly managed. You can usually get away with corporate thinking and corporate management, but not quite so much in entertainment. We’re too picky and fickle to be handled like that.
That original logo animation is just terrible. I’m Glad better minds prevailed.
Also, the Ultima Forever logo kinds of reminds me of the original UO logo, which was beautiful for its pure simplicity. I bet the Ultima Forever logo would make a great pewter pin too. 😛
Apple is very litigious, so yes they could very easily have gotten into trouble over the chime skit.
There’s only one thing that bothers me about the current UF logo, and that’s the little diamond-shaped parts that really don’t belong, because they exist in a vacuum.
The ‘U’ I get. Ultima, duh. The ‘Infinity/Forever’ I get. Apropos in more than one way.
But the little stone diamonds are meaningless. I think they should go away.
See what I mean here:
http://bradvenable.com/images/UFphonelogo.jpg
The diamond bits were included to ensure that there were EIGHT pieces to the logo.
I suppose, though, that the pieces left in your reworking of the logo could be broken in a couple additional places to restore the proper count.
If I remember correctly, there are a couple of reasons for it. One is that there are eight “pieces” of the logo, indicating the eight virtues; without those two diamonds there would only be six. Also, it makes it “more than the sum of its pieces”, Ultima + Infinity + “extra pieces” = Ultima Forever
I prefer the full logo. Not sure why exactly, but the extra diamonds make it look complete.
Someone should send the marketing department Sheri Graner Ray’s Gender Inclusive Game Design… Just speaking as one woman, when I was a kid, it was the non-sexual design in Ultimas III-V that let me view the Stranger/Avatar as my alter-ego and become a dedicated ankh-wearing fan. If the artwork for Ultima V (my first one) had persistently shown a guy or scantily-clad maiden, it would’ve been just another game.