Video game merchandise used to be simple: a T-shirt, a poster, and if somebody really loved you, perhaps a plastic statue that would spend the next decade silently judging you from the top of a bookcase.
Then someone decided gamers needed to know what a zombie smelled like.
That is not an exaggeration. In 2018, Capcom and Numskull produced Resident Evil 2 zombie-scented candles, promising the “distinctive scent of the undead” for players who apparently felt that being chased around Raccoon City by Mr. X wasn’t immersive enough.
This is where gaming merchandise gets interesting. There is the sensible end of the market, where you can find everything from clothing and replica props to Funko figures based on characters from gaming, movies and anime.
And then there is the other end.
Mass Effect Gave Us the Krogan Body Pillow
Mass Effect is about humanity’s place in the universe, interstellar politics and ancient machines periodically wiping out civilisation.
Naturally, this led to body pillows.
BioWare has sold pillows featuring Blasto, the fictional hanar Spectre, but somehow that wasn’t enough. There was also a double-wide Wrex pillowcase requiring two standard body pillows to contain everyone’s favourite Krogan battlemaster.
The product was essentially an opportunity to receive a Krogan hug.
Probably wise to keep it fictional.
Turning a species famous for fighting almost everything it encounters into bedroom furniture is either an inspired understanding of the fanbase or evidence that merchandising departments occasionally need supervision.
Fallout Will Sell You Rubbish From the Apocalypse
Fallout presents another peculiar opportunity because its world is already stuffed with fictional consumer products.
Nuka-Cola is everywhere. Bottle caps are money. The wasteland is basically what happens when consumer culture survives longer than civilisation.
So Bethesda did the logical thing and turned those imaginary products into real ones. Fans can buy Nuka-Cola bottles and replica bottle caps, recreating objects normally found scattered through abandoned buildings.
We have therefore reached an impressive stage of economic development: spending real money on replica post-apocalyptic rubbish.
Better still, bottle caps have value inside Fallout precisely because conventional currency has collapsed. Outside Fallout, you need conventional currency to buy them.
Somewhere, an economist has developed a headache.
Dead Island Took Collector’s Editions Too Literally
Perhaps nothing quite beats Dead Island: Riptide.
Its UK-exclusive Zombie Bait Edition included a 31-centimetre resin statue of a bloodied, severed female torso wearing a Union Jack bikini.
Reaction was not universally along the lines of “finally, the tasteful centrepiece my living room has been missing”. Publisher Deep Silver apologised shortly after it was announced.
What makes it remarkable is the number of opportunities someone presumably had to stop it. Someone proposed the torso. Other people approved it. Artists designed it. Somebody manufactured it. Packaging was created specifically to transport it.
At some point, surely, somebody could have asked: “Are we completely sure about the torso?”
Apparently not.
And that may be the greatest thing about weird gaming merchandise. Once zombie candles, Krogan pillows and post-apocalyptic bottle caps seem commercially reasonable, there probably isn’t a final form.
Hopefully, though, we’ve learned something from the torso.
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