Wait, Haven’t I Seen That Before?

I came home from a hard days work the other day and saw a catalog sitting on my kitchen table. A friend of mine who has done auto glass work left it with my roommate. The catalog was Equalizer’s 2012 edition. Equalizer is a catalog for auto glass technicians to order tools. Here’s their website with a link to the free catalog. Obviously, this catalog has an extremely niche audience and its aimed at professionals, so stumbling upon it would be very unlikely. After seeing the cover of it on my table it didn’t take me long to notice that the cover image was extremely familiar.

When reviewing games on Techpedition I see alot of screenshots and promo images from video games. Two years ago I reviewed Call of Duty: Black Ops. It had some memorable promo images and I remember this shot as being a significant one in the promo packet.
Hmmm, see any similarities? Weird huh? I don’t know what that Livewire thing is, but it sure looks badass when you are using it ferociously in front of an Aztec temple during a war. Everything from the headband, to the to the backpack, to the glove, to the tattooed arm, to the beard, to the armband, are all clearly based off this one specific Black Ops promo image. It gets even better when looking at the back cover of the catalog. Here’s a shot of it.

All pretense of any real world autoglass tool functionality is destroyed when seeing these four familiar characters are repairing windshields in the post apocalyptic future.

Yeah that’s a promotional groupshot for Gears of War 2 starring Marcus Fenix and the gang, or at least a loose approximation of the gang. Baird and Dom seem to have been replaced by bad look-a-likes and Cole is a latin woman! I’m sure her Thrashball career was long and lucrative. The replacement COGs might even be the employees at the art offices of Equalizer just drawing themselves into old video game promo art work.

I’m not trying to call out Equalizer for ripping off Treyarch or Epic, I just think its funny how much effort was put into copying something without ever citing their source. Someone was given the task of creating a cover and instead of creating something new they used two extremely well known game franchises and blatantly copied their promo art. It seems a bit half-assed, but if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Activision and Epic should be flattered…or terribly offended, I’m not sure.

This reminds me of going to the local fair and seeing nik-naks as prizes in the game booths that are direct copes of popular children’s series. At first glance they look legit, but after close examination you know something isn’t right. Spongbob’s pants are quite square, or Michelangelo’s headband is yellow. Seeing that stuff on a small scale, is charming and it has a “China Don’t Care” vibe to it, but to see it on a nationally available catalog is almost uncomfortable. I can’t wait until next year’s catalog, maybe Nathan Drake will be using those big glass moving suction cups to scale a cliff or Master Chief will be charging a dude his deductable for a crack that just got outta hand while he was fixing it.