Ramblings of a Marketing Mind

  Hi there, dear casual reader! Take my hand and follow me into the Wayback machine to take a quick trip back to a place we used to call a “video arcade”. If you’ve ever played videogames, chances are you are familiar with an old coin-op that became very popular in the early 80’s. So popular, in fact, that it spawned a pop culture craze named after it.  The game in question was Pac-Man , and one of the many reasons it became so popular was its devious simplicity: you used a joystick to control a yellow round creature gobbling up dots inside a maze. There were four different colored ghosts obsessed with stopping you, (Blinky, Inky, Pinky and Clyde, in case you were curious about their names). At the four corners of the maze there were “power pellets”. When you "ate" one of these, the ghosts got scared and turned blue for a few seconds when you could chomp them up, leaving behind a pair of blinking eyes that would glide back to the chamber at the center of the maze to regenerat...

Many years ago, in the prehistoric early ‘90’s, I remember strolling through a high-end shopping center and bumping into a then-state-of-the-art    technology demonstration stand. Their most eye-catching item was a cumbersome Virtual Reality helmet with a clunky graphics’ CG environment (similar, but not exactly, to what I attached below to give you an idea of what it was like). In the simulation I experienced, you moved through a crude CGI futuristic town where you could even climb down the sewers while blasting Alien-Xenomorph-like blocky aliens. When I saw this, it blew my mind! I thought this was a gigantic digital evolution leap! The future was here! However, interestingly enough, the technology took a long time to be perfected and actually engage users. To this day, people still are not used to playing and exploring virtually inside the “cyberspace” (kids still prefer exploring the new hyper-real environments displayed on a huge flat screen, than wea...