Resident Evil butcher stunt is terrifyingly good

For those who have observed Resident Evil launches over the years (and for whatever reason, I have), you’ll know that they get weirder and weirder every time.

Now that we’re onto the sixth iteration of the series, they’re going to be pretty odd (they started at a pretty high level of nuts). However, they’ve reached dizzying new heights …

I’ll be honest, I happened to be working with one of the originators of this madcap adventure while she was developing the ideas and had the dubious pleasure of hacking around with ideas.

Any (extremely) loose association with the idea aside, I think they’ve turned into the sort of experiential piece that Sweeny Todd himself would have been proud of.

But what I wanted to highlight in this piece is that, when you boil it all down, this is simply the most brilliant act of taking some really simple ideas and giving them a twist that no one but the creative mind would get to.

This is a butcher selling human body parts. Not that complicated when you look at it like that.

And the content of said butchers is simply a series of meats made up to look human by some rather talented food artists. Once again, not a massive leap (although a work of sculptural genius).

So far, so simple.

It’s just that it has taken a mammoth leap of creative brilliance (and scary brutality) to get to the end execution – because like so many creative ideas, it’s easy to see how it’s done when you see it, but very few people actually get there in the first place.

The other piece of brilliance is the way that this launch has been executed in the media.

Even a title aimed at gamers as hardcore as the Resident Evil base has to appeal beyond that and reach a wider crowd – those who don’t read the gamer mags and Bizarre, Zoo and BoingBoing.

So the fact that this stunt has gained editorial interest from The Sun and Reuters to Huffington Post is a work of delightful genius in itself.

The stunt even managed to promote the title it’s set up to market by promoting itself – with Reuters doing a piece on the marketing campaign and thereby promoting the title, rather than covering either the pop up as a pop up or the game directly.

All in all, this is a piece of work that will delight the fans. Provoke the mildly interested into taking a look at the latest RE offering. And will offend only those who would never touch the title in the first place.

A great example of lateral thinking taken to an extreme and beautifully executed.

James Gordon-MacIntosh is a managing partner at Hope&Glory PR and occasionally pens things on Spinning Around, a blog that he describes as “thinking out loud”. He hasn’t been thinking much lately.