Water Cooler Games served as the web's primary forum for "videogames with an agenda" — coverage of the uses of video games in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment.
The site was maintained at watercoolergames.org from 2003-2009, where it was edited by myself and Gonzalo Frasca. It is now archived here in full.
Surely this must be the first ever advergame that draws a direct correlation between drinking beer and getting women naked. Undress Me is a Flash game with simple inverse-space invaders gameplay, similar to Ferry Halim's Apple Season. The game features the Czech beer Pilsner Urquell, and the player's goal is to catch falling bottles in a six-pack. Catch enough and the "avatar" you choose at the beginning begins to undress. The more beer you store in your magical six-pack, the more she takes off. The game's actually quite, er, challenging, and the avatar even mocks you when you fail. I'm not sure if this game is endorsed by the brand or not, but my guess is that it very much isn't. Even if I'm right, it still seems proper to call it an advergame, after all, the brand is featured prominently along with a URL to the actual beer's website.
In my quest to try to discover the origin of Pilsner Urquell Undress me, I learned that the official Pilsner Urquell website has two games, both classic arcade game knockoffs. Invaders is Urquell's Space Invader's cover, wherein you pilot a bottle of beer against invading aliens. Yes, the beer does fire projectiles (but only after the third round... it is a pilsner after all).
There's also an exceedingly strange self-reflexive sidebar on the game's webpage, purportedly explaining "coolstuff," the particular section of the website that houses Invaders. Says it,
As if that wasn't mouth-gapingly strange enough, even weirder is Urquell's second webgame, Whipround. Whipround is a straight-up (as it were) Pac-Man clone in which the power pills are replaced by bottles of Pilsner Urquell beer. Because, you know, the sauce always helps you devour your inner demons. I'm not sure what "Whipround" signifies, but in my experience large quantities of beer doesn't refine one's motor skills. Maybe if you're a limbless mouth.
What a completely and utterly bizarre day.
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