Microsoft · 2002 · Xbox
"Life Is Short. Play More."
A newborn is fired out of a hospital window, ages into an old man mid-flight, and lands screaming in his own grave. Microsoft ran it as a console advert. Britain banned it.
Released in March 2002 to promote the Xbox's European launch, the commercial formally titled "Champagne" — universally remembered as "Life Is Short" — opens in a delivery room. The baby is born, and rather than being caught it shoots out of the mother, through a window, and into the sky. As it arcs through the air it ages: infant, child, adolescent, adult, middle-aged, elderly, all in one continuous shot, screaming throughout. At the apex of the arc the man dies. The corpse completes its descent and drops neatly into an open grave in a cemetery. The screen cuts to text: "Life Is Short. Play More. Xbox." The advert was, as an argument, perfectly coherent — the entire pitch is that your life is a single short parabola and you should spend more of it playing. As a thing to put on television between programmes, it was a catastrophe. The Independent Television Commission received 136 complaints, including from a pregnant woman, a new mother, and a woman who had lost a baby during childbirth, and banned it from British television on 4 June 2002. The ITC's ruling singled out the man's screaming, which it said "suggested a traumatic experience which, together with the reminder that life is short, made the final scene more shocking". Microsoft, unrepentant, kept running it in cinemas and online.