Double Life (advertisement)
Double Life is a television advertisement released in 1999 by SCE Europe. The 60-second long ad – conceived and written by copywriter James Sinclair, art director, Ed Morris and Trevor Beattie – shows 19 PlayStation players discussing their gaming experience with the console. The ad was the most highly awarded in the world in 1999/2000 and has gone on to gain cult status.
Content
The ad begins with an English-sounding man in a suit who walks through a busy street. He starts the ad by saying "For years, I've lived a double life. In the day, I do my job – I ride the bus, roll up my sleeves with the hoi-polloi.", then a number of different characters are seen including the same man sitting undressed on a bed with a woman, a woman of Asiatic appearance, a middle-aged man on a leather couch with teenage girl who sits down beside him, a young man wearing a hat, a man beside a car, and wearing a scary – looking mask, a shirtless boy on a skate ramp, a man in a bathtub, a black man in a wheelchair, and the man in the bath again, a "couch potato", a person with a deep voice in a corset, a foreign sounding woman with a shaved head, a preschool child, a cyclist wearing sunglasses and a scarf over his face, an older man with long white hair, a topless pregnant woman holding a soundless crying baby, the black man spinning in his wheelchair again and finally the first man, in close up before a black screen comes up at the end saying "Do not underestimate the power of PlayStation".The original ad had a small difference: the line "a life of dubious virtue" was said by the teenage girl, followed in some versions by a black man in athletic clothes making a popping sound with his lips. The girl's entire line was replaced in Sony's official version of the ad during their 2014 #20YearsOfPlay promotion.