Happy 37th birthday, Breakout. You’ve come a long way. You helped develop the first generation of kids with the best hand-eye coordination the world had seen (up until that point). You were the biggest deal in childhood until Star Wars was released a year later and changed the world forever. You were the son of Pong, the father of Pac-Man and the future DNA of Halo. You were technology at its most innocent, before it became associated with porn and violence. You, Breakout, helped millions of children break out of their realities at a time when divorce was skyrocketing and our parents began cooking our meals in microwaves.

Once again, Google makes an excellent PR move by celebrating a milestone in our culture that everyone else would have overlooked. And to recognize Atari Breakout’s birthday with a coveted Google Easter Egg is just perfect considering it’s a gesture from one storied technology entity to another. (To see it yourself visit Google Images and type in “Atari Breakout.”)

Happy Birthday Breakout!

Rejoice, ye college kids (and grown-ups who still spend their weekends in an ever-expanding pile of beer cans and pizza boxes while playing Halo)! You no longer need to suffer through the painstaking effort of pausing your game, dropping the controller, and picking up the phone to order dinner – Pizza Hut and Xbox Live have heard your cries of desperation and are here to help.

In what can only be called the most diabolical dietary partnership since Eric Cartman’s pairing of Hot Pockets and World of Warcraft, Pizza Hut has made their full menu—including customizable pizzas—available through a new Xbox Live app, which allows Xbox 360 owners to place orders using the controller, voice commands, or the Kinect sensor. In order to streamline the pizza’s progress from delectable idea to tangible belt-loosening poundage, users can even connect their PizzaHut.com and Xbox accounts to simplify the ordering process.

Larry Hyrb, Microsoft’s Director of Programming for Xbox Live, said of the pairing:

“We’re always looking at ways to give our audience more of what they’re interested in. If you look at our audience, they love pizza. I mean, who doesn’t? It has international appeal, and Pizza Hut is a recognized brand that matches up well with the Xbox brand.”

Now there’s a man who knows his audience.

So now, if you can just program your robot vacuum to answer the door for you, you may never need to leave your living room again!

Apple hasn’t demonstrated a terribly affable sense of humor when it comes to spoofs on its products or advertising, but that didn’t stop video game website IGN from taking an April Fools’ Day jab at the tech company’s iconic product marketing.

Riding the coattails of (rather sketchy) rumors that an Apple video game console may be in the works, IGN created this tongue-in-cheek spot for the fictional “iPlay”. The video actually starts with a voice-over from Apple’s own industrial designer, Jonathan Ive (granted, some of the words have been dubbed over, but once you hear that familiar voice, you’re clued in). Risky, but rewarding.

As many commenters have pointed out, the spot is actually quite believable…that is, until viewers learn that the only playable game on the iPlay is Angry Birds. From that point forward, the commercial dissolves into comically exaggerated camera angles and self-effacing monologues.

Given the expediency with which Apple’s legal team tends to get such spoofs taken down, we recommend taking a peak while you still can. Happy April Fools’ Day!

Confession: we’re glad that our Christmas vacation started right before the NRA‘s now-infamous December 21 press conference addressing the tragic shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. While thousands of passionate NRA supporters undoubtedly agreed with everything said that day, quite a few PR pros called it a “total disaster” and suggested that spokesman Wayne LaPierre probably should have stayed quiet.

The general idea conveyed at the event: guns and their makers aren’t to blame for gun violence. The real bad guys are “the media”, those ninnies who think elementary schools should be “gun-free zones” and, of course, the makers of “vicious, violent” video games.

We know you’ll be absolutely shocked by the latest revelation in this twisted story, but subsequent research reveals that the NRA has a very…complicated relationship with the companies that make millions on first-person “shooter” games like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor–and that these game makers have long nurtured a “mutually beneficial marketing relationship” with the very industry represented by the NRA.

We never would have guessed…

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Today in Clever PR Moves News, we take you into the world of cosplay, which Wikipedia defines as short for “costume playing”. It’s a type of performance art in which participants wear costumes and accessories to represent a specific character or idea, interacting to create a subculture centered on role play.

Yes, your nerd senses are tingling.

Not everyone gets the whole dressing-up-as-fictional-characters-and-heading-to-conventions-of-like-minded-fans thing, but anyone who ever said that such dedication to fantasy worlds is a waste of time best left to children has just been proven wrong (at least in this case). Irrational Games, creator of the popular BioShock franchise, just hired a Russian cosplayer named Anna Moleva to be the official face of BioShock Infinite’s Elizabeth. Irrational’s creative director Ken Levine wrote in a blog post that Moleva’s striking Elizabeth cosplay was too perfect to ignore; it inspired his team to ask her to represent the character both within the game itself and in related promo materials.

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Say what you will about AMC’s zombie drama “The Walking Dead” (slow plotting, community theater-level acting, not enough gore, yada yada), but the show’s marketing team certainly knows its way around a creative promo. The Season 3 PR blitz started two weeks ago with this (inevitable?) video of oblivious New Yorkers alternately shocked and amused by the coming zombie-ocalypse:

And the fun continued last week with the release of the show’s official Facebook game: Read more

Domino’s Pizza, Fiat, and Levi’s – what do they all have in common? On the surface, very little. But a New York-based business has named the companies among the top 100 brands with “social currency.”

Vivaldi Partners, a group of three companies that includes a strategic consulting firm and an “organizational change” company, rates social currency on six attributes: affiliation, identity, information, conversation, utility, and advocacy. The firm reviewed and analyzed campaigns coming from across Europe, the Americas, and Asia over the past three years.

To sum it up, Vivaldi says: “Social currency is achieved when consumers: share a video, an image, a blog post, a tweet, or a thought about a brand.”

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Just when you thought all the PR gaffes that could be made in 2011 had been made, we have one more example to prove you wrong.

Ocean Marketing has, according to gaming site Kotaku, been pretty much destroyed by a customer service incident that never should have happened ever on modern-day planet Earth.

You can read the entire email chain on the website Penny Arcade, but in short, a customer contacted Paul Christoforo, the president of Ocean Marketing, which was representing a company that makes a video game controller accessory. The customer, Dave, asked some pretty simple questions about when he would receive the item he purchased and somehow this escalated into a back-and-forth with Christoforo calling him names, name-dropping, and just plain-old being a jerk.

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Good news for the video-game industry: On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a California law that banned the sale of violent games to minors, and punished those who sold them with $1,000 fines. California is the seventh state to try – and the seventh state to fail – restricting the sales of violent video games. Now, following the Supreme Court’s ruling, video game companies are essentially shielded from government efforts to regulate violent content.

In the final decision of its 2010-11 term, the court equated violent games with “protected books, plays, and movies” and stated that “video games qualify for First Amendment protection.”

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The Sims Social, a new online game, is coming to Facebook.

Research over the past three months conducted by Women at NBCU’s Brand Power Index found that more women than men have at least one gaming app on their smartphone; 75 percent of women versus 67 percent of men. Women be gaming!

Moreover, the research showed that those brands that offered games during that time period saw a spike in their Brand Index score. For instance, Stouffer’s launched a game on Facebook, “Farmer’s Harvest” in Farmville, with promotions and moved up from number 363 to number 303.

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