- Google Stadia has received a lukewarm reception since it was released.
- An advertisement installation was recently dug up and has been doing the rounds on Twitter.
- The installation in question compared Stadia to the Dreamcast, the Power Glove, and E.T for the Atari 2600.
Google Stadia might be impressive technologically, but it’s not faring too well. It apparently eats a whole bunch of data, doesn’t have great input lag, and frankly costs too much. All these problems aside, it seems like Google Stadia just wasn’t really ready yet, but Google released it anyway.
It turns out that releasing isn’t the only slapshot thing going on at Google. A recent advertisement for Google Stadia has been discovered online, and it’s really interesting. Not only is it interesting, but it’s also weirdly appropriate completely by mistake.
A Line of Technically Impressive Flops
The advertisement in question was actually an installation that featured different pieces of technology. Clearly the implication here was supposed to be that Google Stadia was the next step in technological progression. The problem is that no one seems to have informed Google about which pieces of tech they had chosen.
The all-star lineup included the Sega Dreamcast, The Nintendo Power Glove and… E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600. Wow. For anyone not up to date on these items let me give you the rundown. The Sega Dreamcast was impressive for the time but was just too expensive for the company that made it and it flopped. The Power Glove was a gimmicky controller for the NES that also flopped. Finally, E.T is the game largely credited with causing the video game crash of 1983.
You sort of has to wonder what on earth was going through the minds of those at Google. Did no one really look at this lineup and think something was a bit fishy? The Dreamcast might make sense because it is genuinely an awesome console. Everything else here is a sign which really should have pointed towards Google Stadia’s bumpy start.
Why This Advert Even Happened
It seems that we might have a few answers for why this installation came about at all. Frank Cifaldi, the founder of the Video Game History Foundation, responded to the pictures with some backstory. Apparently the foundation was paid to supply the props used in the installation, and as such he had an inside track on what had gone wrong.
It seems like someone at Google at been a bit indecisive. According to Cifaldi’s tweet, they didn’t know quite what they were looking for and changed things around numerous times. Eventually, they tried mashing two successful ideas together and ended up with what we see before us. It’s likely that this advertisement would have been completely ignored if Google Stadia had launched well. Fortunately for us it didn’t so now we get to enjoy this hot mess.
Personally, I think the story of this advertisement is indicative of the entire Google Stadia launch. It’s clear that the entire project has been mismanaged from start to finish. They haven’t thought about how the cost would work. They haven’t thought about technical limitations, and they didn’t wait for their studios to actually produce an exclusive before releasing. No matter how you look at it, Google Stadia is a failure of the company’s own making.
