Mar 03
THQ Promotes Homefront with 10,000 Balloons, Angers Environmentalists
Posted in: Today's Chili, video games, Weird News
If you’re looking to draw the ire of environmentalists, there’s no better place to do it than in San Francisco–and really, there are few more immediately visible ways to do so than releasing 10,000 brightly-colored balloons into the sky. It was all part of a promotion stunt for THQ’s upcoming Homefront game.
THQ released the balloons yesterday, during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, immediately landing itself on the s-list of pretty much every environmentalist in the Bay Area. Here’s a quote from Rod Fujita, an oceans scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, that about sums it up, “When I looked out the window and saw thousands of balloons dropping straight into the bay, I was flabbergasted. I never expected to see something like this in San Francisco, where there’s such concern about the bay and pollution.”
THQ released the 10,000 read “messages of hope” to “simulate a method used by South Korea to send messages of hope to the North.” The balloons rose and the dropped almost immediately into the bay, thanks to rainy weather.
Complaints quickly put the game company on the defensive. THQ insisted that the balloons, “were made from a 100 percent organic product and are 100 percent biodegradable.”
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