The 8 most embarassing ads for gaming colleges

This is the worst disaster of childish wish fulfillment since getting to eat all the candy you want and dying a diabetic virgin.

The "video game office" looks like an ‘80s movie police department but even more fake, where the entire department consists of two crazy loose cannons and about twenty background nobodies whose only job is "mill around and symbolize The Man."

Both are advanced victims of the televised "playing games on camera makes you twitch like Michael J Fox accidentally plugged the controller into the outlet" disease, though they do suggest an amazing fictional wonderland where you can just "tighten up the graphics on level three." So every time you play a game with loose graphics, remember it's because they didn't hire enough high school dropouts to tighten them, presumably by pressing A to "Use the Graphics Wrench."

This ad is more offensively targeted at nerds than a cheetos-dust seeking missile. "I can't believe we got jobs doing this!" says one, in what must be a secret warning to viewers. "My mom said I would never get anywhere with these games!" crows the other, and you can almost hear her asking him when he's going to move out of her basement.

The Game You'd Make: Even if you do get hired by a game company after any of these degrees, the first game you make will be "Cats & Dogs 3D" for the iPhone, and because of Walmart it can't include violence, and the Association for Differently Abled Americans will say jumping is discriminatory, and it needs to be ready this week, and everything in the office is padded because staff keep bludgeoning themselves to death.

1. University of Advancing Technology, Arizona

Our Grand Prize Winner earns the golden turd not because it manages to advertise a video game degree by using hand drawn artwork, but because it displays an unfounded, unearned swagger that makes us want to punch each and every person involved with it right in the colon. Other ads suck. This one actually pisses us off.

The University of Advancing Technology researched Assholology and created an entirely new kind of prick by hybridizing douchebags and entitled geekdom. The douchehat in that ad is such a disaster of cool the Fonz would feel compelled to break his jaw - though technically, making contact with that miniature ass acting as this guy’s chin might count as a spanking instead of a punch.

But it somehow gets worse. The quote at the top makes us wonder if the Academy of Art’s motto is "ruining our students' careers before they even start." Mark Hartlieb just got a B.A. in Game Design, the career equivalent of screeching "I'm on level 5!" instead of taking out trash for your Mom, and he thinks he can talk shit about Pong? No, Mark - if Pong disappeared tomorrow people would care, and we’re afraid the same isn't true for you because nobody has ever heard of you. Unless you’re the man Will Wright, Shigeru Miyamoto and John Carmack go to for inspiration, “guys like you” have nothing to do with launching gaming into the next generation.

In fact, according to our mildly comprehensive google search, Mark’s extreme 'Tude (a word resurrected from the ‘80s specifically for this level of failure) and gnarly degree have thus far been unable to even get him off the campus, never mind into the game industry. Apparently now an employee of the school’s IT department, Mark's greatest gaming achievement seems to have been an unfinished map for Unreal Tournament, where even the main project page is built entirely out of excuses and complaints that there was too much work and the team couldn't finish it. Great spokesman choice, UAT. You’ve actually made us hate a man we’ve never met.

The Game You Would Make: "Hanging around your college after graduation reinstalling Windows on shared computers Hero."

Sep 9, 2010

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Yes, we would like some cheese with our whine – all this bitching has made us hungry