In Run the Bunny, you play as the Duracell mascot bunny, the original drumming battery rabbit that eventually lost its trademark to Energizer. Your goal is to collect Duracell batteries, which allow you to proceed through a number of levels. The bunny moves around in a Wolfenstein-esque pseudo-3D maze, looking for the exit and whatever other items come his way, such as hatpins that pop balloons. Or drumsticks, which do nothing. Or the Duracell drum, another seemingly important item that also can’t be used. The game insists that you must deliver the drum and drumsticks to another bunny in the stage, but that bunny is either missing or already drumming away by the time you show up. Come to think of it, the batteries – the most important objects in the game – can be avoided too. Essentially, every objective the game asks you to perform is optional. Most of the items serve no function whatsoever and disappear between levels.
 
You might question their inclusion, but you’d be too distracted by the random objects placed in each stage. Run the Bunny includes a light puzzle element, in that touching one part of the level will cause another section to change in some way. Rather than fall for the standard “put the key in the door” trap, the good folks at Adware Interactive (really) went for illogical image association. For example, touching clowns will open a wall, as will ducks. Right? Even the in-game help file gives up, simply stating that “Depending on where you are in the game different things will happen.” Other environmental interactions include sliding RC cars into panes of glass or collecting bunnies that disappear on contact with no visible effect.
 
The game drops this shtick about halfway through and turns into a series of animated vignettes featuring pink bunnies weightlifting and playing musical instruments. Things start drifting into incomprehensibility at this point. The interface makes progressively less sense, with bizarre loading screens featuring the Duracell bunny kayaking through space and a display of what appears to be multicolored planets, one more added for each stage completed.
 
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The best part? By the game’s release in 1996, the Duracell Bunny had been entirely phased out in the company’s American ad campaign.
 
UPDATE: I recently had an email exchange with Mel Croucher, the CEO of Adware Interactive, about Run the Bunny. The truth is shocking but somehow unsurprising.
Players who completed Run the Bunny were presented with a sweepstakes screen where they could win battery-powered devices big and small. By inputting their email address, winners also submitted their gameplay history. Those weird, optional random objects and interactive sequences? They were purposely constructed to figure out players’ lifestyle preferences for directed email marketing. Anyone entering the sweepstakes also had the option to email the game to a friend, with the catch that they would receive copies of any prizes the referrer won. And of course, their emails entered an advertising database too. The game also included a huge variety of languages to broaden the player base.
The result? Run the Bunny was a massive, orchestrated attempt to create an email advertising network for Duracell. It’s brilliant, but scary. According to Croucher, Duracell reached triple its initial estimates, all from players “shoving virtual batteries into virtual pink bunnies.”
 
Though you have to wonder, how did people have the patience to play to the end of that?

True story 1: around the time when that fucking hipster pixel "stylized" look* became the de-facto artistic AND advertisement standard post-2000** (yuck),
i theorized the reason why pixel art was enticing in first place was for similar reasoning like yours:
it deliberately ignores golden ratio, that 1 : 1.4 - measurements (=rectangle's pacing). It's all nothing but perfect square blocks, and you can only (terribly) try to put them around the grind to /look/ like golden ratio, to an artificial effect.

Spoiler (Click to reveal)

 

 

Morrone’s television career began as a guest on the News 12 program The Family Pet. In 1995, he started a cable show, Extra Help Pet Show, later renamed Metro Pets. His practice of crowding dozens of animals in a small space on-camera was allegedly born of necessity — Morrone claimed it was needed to keep the animals warm in the unheated television studio.