Bandai Namco seems to be embracing meme culturing by marrying Sand Land and Darude Sandstorm to create this trailer.
Table of Contents
It’s not every day a major corporation embraces meme culture and successfully integrates it into the marketing of their product. But that’s what’s happened with Bandai Namco uploading a Sand Land trailer with Darude Sandstorm as the background music. The trailer itself is what you’d expect: various characters being shown while the music builds up, after which things take an action-packed turn when the beat drops, with characters powering up and attacking each other either with their fists or with their vehicles, all while a two-decade-old song is blasted into your ears.
It seems like the only reason the publisher released this trailer is the synergy between the upcoming game and the song, the latter of which achieved legendary meme status many moons ago. The trailer was uploaded to Bandai’s YouTube channel and seems to have gone down well with viewers, with many commenting that the song was a great fit for the game, which is further reinforced by nearly 3,000 likes. Overall, this seems to be a win for the marketing team (or as the kids say, “an absolute W”).
What is Darude Sandstorm?
For any of the young’uns out there, Darude Sandstorm is a song created by Darude, a Finnish DJ, and dropped in the ancient age of the 1990s (1999, specifically). As with many songs, it showed up in TV shows, movies, and sports matches. Once the new millennium began, it started popping up as the background music in Twitch streams and in Let’s Play videos on YouTube. Since Darude Sandstorm was everywhere, people started asking the song’s name and from there, others used it as an answer whenever people asked for the name of a song, regardless of whether or not it was Darude Sandstorm.
Bandai even pinned a comment they made, asking viewers to tell them what the song’s name was.
What is Sand Land?
I’m sure most of you knew Akira Toriyama as the fella who wrote Dragon Ball, but he also wrote other manga. Case in point: Sand Land. It’s a post-apocalypse story set many years in the future, where war has ravaged our entire world. What’s left now is an unbearably hot desert wasteland called Sand Land, populated by demons and humans alike. Water is scarce, but there are rumors that out in the desert, there exists a spring full of it.
This is where our main cast of characters comes into play. Sheriff Rao requires help in looking for this fabled body of water and he gets it in the form of Demon Prince Beelzebub and Thief, a demon skilled in robbery and Beelzebub’s chaperone. Along the way, they’ll utilize a tank for vehicle-to-vehicle combat and content with bandits, the creatures that inhabit Sand Land, and the Royal Army of the tyrannical king that rules over this wasteland.
Sand Land was originally a one-shot manga that Toriyama wrote. In 2023, a Sand Land anime movie was released, followed by an anime series in 2024 on Hulu and Disney Plus. The first six episodes retell the events of the movie, but with extra scenes, while the other seven episodes comprised “The Story of the Angel Hero” arc, which Toriyama wrote for this series before he passed away.
There’s also the Sand Land video game that’s coming out on April 26. That trailer with Darude Sandstorm was promoting this game. It’s made by developer ILCA and looks to be adapting Toriyama’s story into a video game format. Sand Land is coming out on PS5, PS4, PC, and Xbox Series X/S and is one of the last projects Akira Toriyama was involved in before his passing.
Pingback: Black Myth Wukong store page now live on PlayStation, pre-orders likely available before August 20 release - Newzertainment