B Movies Blog

Hello, Movie Mavens! Welcome back to the B Movies Blog. Today, we’re popping Hotel 626 and Asylum 626 into the ol’ VCR.

It’s time for another edition of Lost and Refound Media, the series where we discuss lost media that probably feels like a fever dream. 

I had totally forgotten about the subject of today’s piece until Loey Lane covered it in a video a couple of months ago. 

And as both a horror and marketing girlie, I knew that I had cover it, too. 

That’s right, friends. 

We’re covering Hotel 626 and Asylum 626, the spooky flash games Doritos created to promote the re-release of two different discontinued chip flavors. 

The games could only be played from 6:00 p.m to 6:00 a.m. (aka how the name 626 came to be) and guided users through both a haunted hotel and asylum. 

Hotel 626 came first on Halloween 2008 with Asylum 626 following on Halloween 2009. 

In Hotel 626, players fought their way through a haunted hotel, while Asylum 626 forced players to try to survive inside a cursed asylum. 

As far as I can tell, these games were pretty well received by players before ultimately being taken down around 2011. 

For years, the games seem to be forgotten (so I don’t feel as bad), but over the past year or so, they’ve become a popular topic of discussion in lost media. 

I also have good news and bad news. 

While the games themselves are no longer playable, you can find playthrough footage of Hotel 626. However, footage of Asylum 626 seems practically nonexistent. 

I was able to find a video or two of what appears to be gameplay, but it’s either really shaky or doesn’t seem to depict the game in its entirety. 

So, unfortunately, this piece really is an example of lost and refound media. 

I also love that we’re starting to see more brands revert to unique marketing tactics like we saw in the 90s and 00s, ranging from Jack in the Box’s horror short to the cryptic footage released for Weapons. 

I want to do another piece about guerilla marketing, so I’m not going to dive into in here, but the way you market your product DOES matter. 

Think about how memorable the marketing was for The Blair Witch Project. 

It would probably still be one of my favorite movies without the marketing tactics, but the marketing takes things up a notch. 

I want to see return to guerilla marketing, and researching these games only amplified my yearning. 

While we have a pieces of both lost and refound media today, I think one thing is super clear:

Other brands need to take Doritos’s lead.