The Super Bowl is perhaps the biggest spectacle in all of popular American culture, and last night, a couple of gamers managed to wiggle their way into the fanfare with some cameos.
Fortnite World Cup champion Bugha and Twitch streamer TimTheTatman each made separate appearances in Super Bowl ads, but if you blinked you might have missed one, or even both, of them.
Tim isn’t new to the Super Bowl advertising game. Last year, he and Ninja were a part of the NFL 100 commercial before halftime, and this year, Tim was working with NFL 100 again as a part of a pre-game advertisement that led into the delivery of the game ball.
In a two-minute long advertisement filled with notable NFL players, both past and present, a young baller is told by Jim Brown to “take it to the house, kid” during a pick up football game.
The words from a great motivate the kid to run with the football into the endzone and never stop, travelling the country by foot. As he makes his way through some farm land in the country a man on a tractor sees him and repeats those motivating words, “Take it to the house, kid.”
If you weren’t paying attention, you may have missed it already. The man on the tractor was TimTheTatman. His time on the screen was short-lived, but so was everyone’s.
The nearly three-minute-long ad had appearances from more than a handful of NFL stars, as well as some non-football personalities like USWNT player Carli Loyd. No individual person, outside of the child playing the role of the main character, received more than a few moments of airtime.
Bugha’s time on screen was equally short, if not shorter, but he too was in a jam packed commercial filled with celebrity for hummus maker Sabra.
Boasting a total of 19 celebrities in less than 60 seconds, the commercial opens up with retired professional wrestler Rick Flair asking Americans how you “‘Mmus,” which seems to be some sort of slang for “eat hummus.”
Bugha’s scene of less than two seconds shows him in an all yellow outfit inside a yellow room gaming on, you guess it, a yellow controller. The Fortnite champion gets one word, “Bananas.”
The single word response to how he ‘Mmus is a play on an answer he gave to Jimmy Fallon during his interview on The Tonight Show last year after winning the Fortnite World Cup.
When asked what he eats and how he prepares himself to compete at a high level, the only thing Bugha could think to tell Fallon was that he eats bananas.
Among the wide array of celebrities in the ad were rapper T-Pain, former NFL QB Boomer Esiason, Scary Spice from the 90s female pop group the Spice Girls, and even Doug the Pug.
The increased inclusion of gamers in Super Bowl commercials signifies an increased shift in popular culture toward the acceptance of esports, and watching streamers, as a mainstream form of entertainment.
Published: Feb 3, 2020 10:47 am