Dante’s Stealth Marketing

In the run up to tomorrows release of Dante’s Inferno on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, EA/Visceral Games step up the advertising activity. First we had the news of the prime time Super Bowl ad, but this part of the ad campaign isn’t as in-yer-face as is usual, in fact it’s pretty much hidden to almost everyone in the source code of various websites.

The Dante’s Inferno Twitter feed first broke the news with the instruction to view the source code of aggregator digg.com, doing so will reveal some ascii art, a web address and a password. Since then Kotaku has uncovered more passwords hidden in the homepage source code of DailyMotion, IGN, Kotaku, Games Radar, GameSpot and the WWE.

You can visit the website yourself to see the ascii art and gather the passwords, or alternative just take a peek at the Kotaku sourced images below. the passwords can be used on the website HellIsNigh.com to unlock a 189MB file which includes 8 hi-res wallpapers, 5 awesome posters, 6 ascii art pieces, a book of concept art and rather spiffingly a collection of 3 music tracks from the game.

You can check out the source code yourself if you prefer by visiting the website’s in question, right clicking and selecting View Source. If you’ve not bagged your copy of Dante’s Inferno yet, you can pick your copy up from Amazon here, and help TSA in the process.