Did Ecko's Getting Up Campaign Succeed or Backfire?

I've been hearing so much about the game Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure that I feel I've already played all the levels and even spray painted the torch on the Statue of Liberty, or whatever they get to do when they reach the end.  But when I saw the press release announcing the actual release of the game by Atari to multiple platforms, I was totally unclear on whether or not this was the first retail appearance or not.

Now, I'm often confused when I read something like this, especially if it involves an area which I only observe, such as games.  Normally, feeling that confusion and wanting to look like Mr. Know-It-All and then some, I spend a lot of time checking things out, going back to earlier coverage, etc.  Obviously that's not typical for bloggers, if there is such a thing as typical blogging behavior, but it fits what I'm trying to do at ProHipHop and my own tendencies to want to fully understand what I'm writing about before I write about it.

But I haven't done any of that with this post and am taking it as an opportunity to discuss the issue of oversaturation in marketing using my own experience as an example.  I've been following the news about the game since it was first announced, due to writing ProHipHop.  I cringed when I saw Shepard Fairey prominently mentioned because I've considered him a clown ever since Andre had a posse (but a good marketer, nonetheless).  I found out much more about Marc Ecko than I'd known before and started to develop respect for him.  I had the mobile version, which has been out for a while, demoed one on one by a guy from Glu at a conference in San Francisco (very impressive).  I checked out the Getting Up presence at G.A.M.E., also in SF, though the still-in-beta version had already crashed by early morning.  And so on.

None of this makes me an expert on Getting Up or anything special but it does make me somebody outside of gaming, the kind of person Ecko says gaming companies should reach, who's heard a lot about the game and paid attention to the news as it came out.

Yet, I've been so thoroughly satured with Getting Up marketing that when I saw the press release it didn't read like big news.  My initial impression was confusion as to whether or not they were announcing a release on a specific platform and it felt like the game was already out somewhere, but I couldn't remember the details.  And I didn't even register the fact that they're also releasing a soundtrack at the same time, though that's also real news.

Sitting here thinking about how I got oversaturated, I can't really say if it's a byproduct of ProHipHop and following news obsessively or the fact that to reach a mass market in a media glutted environment takes crazy levels of marketing activity or the fact that I'm not a gamer.  But I do feel that the incredible range of appearances by Marc Ecko and related events announcing the game's future arrival seemed like too much too soon.

So what do you think?  Has the Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure campaign to date been a brilliant example of marketing to a mass audience or a form of oversaturation that ultimately undermines the actual release of the product?

PS - I just checked the M. Ecko category to get one of the above links and realized that he gave his keynote at a major gaming conference, an event that I think of as the beginning of the campaign, about a year ago.  That's a long campaign!

To check out highlights of this campaign your can see ProHipHop's M. Ecko category as well as even more press releases on Ecko at Hip Hop Press (that reveal my sadly incomplete coverage.