Meet Yaris, the Advergame that many regard to be the worst game ever released on the Xbox 360’s Xbox Live Arcade
Did you know that the Xbox Live Arcade actually started as a disc based distribution service on the original Xbox? Chances are you didn’t (though I eagerly await the one person in the comments who stands to correct me), because Microsoft’s mini marketplace only gained widespread popularity once it relaunched alongside the release of the Xbox 360. As someone who bought a 360 close to launch, when there weren’t a huge amount of games out and backwards compatibility with OG Xbox games was limited, I used to look forward to every single new XBLA drop. I’d snap up whatever was on offer at the time, be it a new title like Zuma or a port of an old school arcade classic like Gauntlet. Some were great, some were bad, but none were ever as truly terrible as Yaris, a game that many regard to be The Worst Game Ever Released(TM) on the Xbox Live Arcade.
Released in October of 2007 and then quietly delisted around a year later. Yaris was an Advergame developed by Castaway Entertainment and published by Backbone Entertainment, in partnership with the car manufacturer, Toyota. The term ‚Advergame‘ is used to describe a game created to advertise a product and, as soulless and corpo-douche as that term sounds, ancient Advergames like Cool Spot, Zool and McDonaldland are all remembered with fondness by those who played them. Nowadays, if a brand with a capital B wants to market itself to the youth, it can just chuck some money at a popular game like Roblox or Fortnite – or, in the case of KFC, PUBG Battlegrounds. Throw a couple of skins or emotes into an existing title and job done, nice and simple.
But, back in the early days of the Xbox 360, when live service games were mainly confined to the PC, those capital B brands had to do something different. And by different I mean, putting some actual effort into releasing a full, playable video game. The small wave of budget priced or free advergames in the Xbox 360 era however were either absolutely terrible, like Burger King’s Pocket bike racer, a game where you can play as a junior whopper on a moped, or incredibly forgettable, like Red Bull Crashed Ice Kinect which I didn’t even know existed until I started researching this piece. The only real exception to the terrible Xbox 360 Advergames rule was Doritos Crash Course, a curiously addictive obstacle course game that saw you pushing your Xbox Avatar across the kind of treacherous terrain that would make Takeshi Kitano jealous.
