The box quote. We all have our favorite oddball ones – “under-water-based levels very reminiscent of Mario 64” for Bubsy 3D, “our frothing demand for this game increases” for Ikaruga, and so on. (Please leave a comment for what your favorite oddball quote is.) A somewhat lost art, you’d see so many gaming publications make such oddball quotes that makes you wonder who were the ad wizards who were thinking of that one. But there’s been one boxquote that’s been stuck in my head for years, literal years that I had to figure out if it was real.
“Halo with Chips.”
This is a quote from Maxim magazine about the game Stacked with Daniel Negreanu. I already wrote about Stacked back in 2020, and even when I was playing the game for the article, that particular quote kept jumping out at me. It’s so absurd when you think about it: It’s pretty clear they’re saying it’s as addictive as Halo, but it feels very hamfisted.
At the time I wrote about Stacked, I had no idea where it came from. Saying it came from Maxim could really mean anything at the time: Was it in the magazine, or the website? Did it come from the US or UK branch of the magazine? Was it even something printed or was it just something made up by Maxim’s PR department? These were some lightly burning questions, so when I wrote about Stacked and a handful of times after publication, I kept trying to find the source.
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