Pepsiman
Where do you even start with Pepsiman. Thanks to the endless curiosity of the internet, Pepsiman is a pretty well-known quantity at this point. He’s a weird mascot for Pepsi in a logo-covered sparkling bodysuit. He runs around, he cracks open Pepsi cans… and that’s about it. Just watch these Pepsiman commercials to get a better grasp on the character. Not that it’s going to help.
The Pepsiman game is kind of like a free runner before free runners existed. It’s a PS1 game where you’re stuck on a track, trying to collect as many Pepsi cans as possible while blasting through houses, dodging traffic, and sliding under obstacles. Between gameplay, there are bizarre grotesque tableaus of fat Americans drinking far too much sugary Pepsi for their health. All while a repetitive, droning “Pepsiman!” theme song blares over everything you do. The mascot is weird, so this licensed soft drink game is also going to be weird.
Gotham City Imposters
What if there was a Batman game where you don’t play as Batman, which features none of Batman’s rogue gallery? You’d get Gotham City Imposters, a team-based multiplayer shooter developed by Monolith that is extremely weird for the premise alone. Normally you’d play as the premiere characters in a comic book game — but in Gotham City Imposters, you play as one of the eponymous imposters. You’ll join one of two rival gangs — one stanning Joker, the other Batman. You’ll get gear and outfits themed after your favorite hero / villain, but you absolutely will not play as them.
Which kind of makes sense. This is a multiplayer shooter where the characters are wielding real (if cartoonish) guns and shooting each other. Not exactly the type of thing Batman would do. The entire premise (a Batman game where you don’t play as Batman) is weird, but the game itself was actually really fun. This was released around the early days of F2P shooters, so the games hadn’t yet cracked that Fortnite code to make an infinite revenue stream. Gotham City Imposters shut down pretty quickly, and it’s the one game on this list I’d still like to play again one day.
All these games are very real, very licensed, and make very little sense. There are more games from the bizarro land of cheap cash grab corporate culture, so let us know which ones we’ve missed.
