Entirely self-indulgent post today, because I finally took like two hours to answer a really trivial question that has been bugging me for, at this point, literal years.

See, back in early 2008 I played through the campaign mode of Ubisoft’s “Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas” which I will hereafter refer to as “R6V”.  I also eventually played the sequel.  I don’t think I played any Rainbow Six games after this point.  A brief perusal of Wikipedia suggests that Ubisoft more-or-less dropped the franchise until they released Rainbow Six: Siege, which is one of those all-multiplayer-all-the-time things that I shy away from.

Anyway.  R6V came out very early in the Xbox 360’s lifecycle, so I was surprised to see in-game ads for “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” plastered across bus stops in Las Vegas when I played it in 2008, since this was a currently-airing show and hadn’t existed at the time the game was originally released.  Coming from the PS2 generation, it was the first time I’d really seen games updated behind the scenes.

Anyway.  I finished it, eventually played the sequel, more-or-less left the world of tactical shooters behind, felt pretty good about having dipped my toes into the genre but without any real urge to go back to it.

At some point, though, I remembered those bus stop ads and wondered what they would be like if I played the game today.  Surely they wouldn’t still be advertising a TV show from 2008, but …surely Ubisoft isn’t still selling ad space in a video game released over a decade prior?  Not the most pressing question, but one that has occasionally gnawed at the back of my mind.

So today, when I launched Elden Ring for the first time in a couple of months and it told me that it needed to download a 20GB patch, I decided to answer the question for myself.

I had, somehow, forgotten how awful the first level of R6V is and how poorly-spaced the checkpoints are.  It’s brown and ugly and just keeps GOING, with a couple of moments where you are certain it must have ended and then it throws a new objective at you.  There were a couple of deaths where, any other day, I would have thrown put the controller gently down in frustration and played something else.

But not today.  Today I needed to get to Las Vegas proper to answer my question for myself, and that meant grinding through the godawful Mexico level before being released on to the glittering streets of Sin City.

Fortunately, the bus stops I was curious about are right there as soon as you get to Vegas, so I didn’t need to play too much more of the game to satisfy myself.

So here we go:

These two ads look like placeholders.  A fake movie poster and an in-universe ad for the casino I’m about to shoot my way through.  If I’d played the game off a physical disc without an internet connection, I’m willing to bet all the ads would look like this.

However, there are still a few ads for real things.  For example, there IS a company called Sha Clothing.  I’m pretty sure they have no connection to the company that was at “sha-clothing.com”.  But there was a Sha Clothing there, once upon a time.

To be clear, there’s nothing at that URL now.  Looking through the internet wayback machine, the last time there WAS anything at that URL was 2017 and it was just a domain squatter offering the site for sale.  It looks like it hasn’t been an active business since 2008.

For the record, the domain appears completely up for grabs.  If you wanted to take it over and host a site to confuse anyone playing an 18 year old Xbox 360 game, knock yourself out.

Finally, Axe.  I’m pretty sure this stuff is still for sale, but I was completely unable to find any record of the “Change Your Odds” tagline used in their advertising.   It may have been exclusive to this game since it’s set in Vegas and they were trying for a sort of gambling motif?  I couldn’t find any images of this specific package design either, so I’ll assume it’s quite old as well.

My guess from this little dive into history is that there’s a forgotten server somewhere hosting the last ads from the last advertisers that paid Ubisoft to show up in R6V, and that the game dutifully checks that server for ads when started and pulls down the latest ones on offer.  There may not be a Sha Clothing anymore, Axe may have long moved on from the campaign and their marketing department almost certainly has no idea that they are getting one heck of a return on whatever check they last cut to Ubisoft, but R6V does not know these things.  It knows only that there are ads, and it must serve them to whatever audience exists.