There's a gaming blog post on The Age website today about the way Sony revolutionised video game advertising.
Moving away from game footage, Sony successfully delivered the message that PlayStation was an experience that shouldn't be missed. With brilliant campaigns like Double Life and Fun, Anyone?, their ads stirred emotion and showed that games were part of a cool lifestyle.
It goes on to describe the David Lynch Third Place campaign as a misstep but (as a self confessed Lynch fan) I think it's brilliant.
David Lynch hates talking about his work (he never does commentary tracks on his dvds) and prefers to let the work do the talking, so it's fair to say that no-one entirely knows what it's all about but there's nothing wrong with that.
The way I see it, he's a proud standard bearer of Surrealism, mixed up with stylish dollop of 50s Americana. It's very much about a dreamlike place, which crosses over often enough into reality to demand your attention but which at the same time is like nothing on earth.
In this ad, being necessarily shorter, he just dives right on in and dishes up a true surreal experience. We are the man in the suit, navigating an unfamiliar place that just gets stranger and stranger. This represents the trip into the unexplored depths of your mind that the PS2 offers, letting you see and experience things that you never have before.
Now if only the games could be that good.
