Verizon has joined forces with director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Jumper, Edge of Tomorrow) to promote their 5G services for gamers in a new spot that illustrates how glitches would affect real life.
In the video, a camera floats around a suburban neighborhood, showing people trying to go on with their everyday life while glitches make everything look weird. We are shown the real-life representation of classic visual glitches in-game, such as the same animation repeating over and over when a man closes a door, or different models that get stuck in the same place, with a tree growing in the spot where a car is parked. There’s even a woman riding an invisible bike, while the real bike follows her. The absurd premise escalates as the spot reaches its climax, when the world is reset with a better internet connection and everything goes back to normal.
Every player has faced the glitches shown in the spot, with objects getting rendered only when you are too close, or NPCs getting stuck in walls. Sometimes these bugs are caused by shortcomings in a game’s development process, but they are also present with online games when there’s something wrong with the internet connexion. This spot, then, is the perfect and fun way to illustrate how a good internet service can make gaming look better.
With game streaming becoming ever more common, with platforms such as Stadia and xCloud already fighting for this new market, a stable internet connection will become even more essential to players. Kudos to Verizon and Liman for finding such a simple but effective way to illustrate the issue.
Check out the new spot below and try to remember where you’ve last seen each of the presented glitches: