The bigger comics companies must have had kinds of expenses the smaller companies didn't, but they made up for it by apparently engaging in bizarre revenue schemes the smaller companies didn't also. Periodically you'd see these "phone games" advertised in a comic book's pages -- I always imagined that they were a bid to trick readers into spending a few minutes paying
egregious 1-900 number rates in order to hear something that some Marvel interns came up with after work and a few beers, speaking goofily in the voices of their favorite characters to come up with some non-canonical adventures callers could direct by pressing 1 or 2 on their touch-tone phone.
This is all pure speculation, as I would never call such numbers. I know that there were some schemes such as I describe, such as Steve Jackson's F.I.S.T., but from the looks of things this one was more of a trivia-by-phone game. I can't speak to its precise gameplay details, but gee whiz, that's a lot of small print!
Audio games aren't video games, but they share a lot of territory (that liminal "computer game" intertidal zone: if you can make a phone maze, you can make a game.) And of course, unlike
most "video" games, these ones could be played by the deaf! (somewhat expensively...)
This is definitely one of the not-so-proud moments of the comic book industry.
ReplyDeleteAnd, it wasn't just a little thing. They made multiple copies of these, and advertised them in big double page spreads. Just some basic math tells you that they must have made enough money (or expected to make enough money) to offset giving up the center spread of advertising pages.
It makes you wonder (well, makes /me/ wonder) what forces converged to make this happen at this moment in time, not earlier and not later. Was it access to a certain type of technology in-house, or perhaps a relaxation of laws regarding this kind of predatory telephony service? I can see it working, but if indeed it did, why didn't they all start doing these -- and why don't they still? Maybe every chump who could be tricked into coughing up did, once, twice, then their phone comics habit began cutting into their comics budget. I must own up to some curiosity regarding the games' contents, but from the outside, these ads are all we can know about them for sure.
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