By Alex Konrad, reporter
FORTUNE — This Valentine’s Day, thousands of people used their keyboards and web browsers not to buy flowers or forget-me-nots, but to aim and fire a machine gun at an ice cream truck best-known as the wheels of a homicidal, virtual clown. I was supposed to be one of them.
They were participating in ad firm Deutsch LA’s Shoot My Truck campaign. Its client, Sony’s (SNE) PlayStation division, wanted a buzzy campaign to re-launch its Twisted Metal racing game franchise. With a limited budget that would have traditionally gone to pay for banner ads online, the advertisers took a more unusual, eye-catching, and disturbing route. They came up with something off-kilter and edgy, much like the video game’s apocalyptic aesthetic.
MORE: Angry Birds slingshots onto Facebook
Winston Binch, chief digital officer at Deutsch, says the team conceived the idea to have fans use their computers to remotely shoot a machine gun at a truck looking like the game character Sweet Tooth’s ride in the desert and then blow it up with C4 explosive — just your run of the mill marketing idea — months ago. The setup for the project took five weeks. For the actual shoot, there were 55 people on the ground in the desert overseeing the operation, which used several M249 SAW light machine guns and included 45 explosions, the last of which obliterated the targeted truck.
The stunt started Tuesday and continued Wednesday, when the team kept #shootmytruck a nationally promoted trend on Twitter. On the project’s website, shootmytruck.com, a live stream of tweets showed that many fans were writing about the effort, along with a few lost souls of the social media platform who posted confused messages questioning why they would want to shoot their own trucks. By logging in through Twitter or Facebook, fans were entered in a lottery to get a chance to shoot the pianos, oil drums, and other objects surrounding the truck itself, a well-known target for those who played the series years ago.
MORE: 11 streaming services that want to take Netflix’s crown
Shooting a machine gun through your computer on Valentine’s Day. It’s definitely not the most romantic of ideas. But Sony hopes it energized the Twisted Metal fan base, younger male users who drive much of the game industry’s sales. Plenty of people did participate, based on the traffic numbers from Deutsch: about 319,000 people visited the Shoot My Truck site, and posted about the event on Twitter or Facebook about 10,000 times. With numbers like that, it would not be shocking to see Deutsch or another agency try an effort with similar computer-to-live environment engagement.
I was one visitor who walked away disappointed, however. Despite quietly skipping the line, a technical glitch kept me from taking my turn against the truck. One of the only things weirder than shooting a gun for a promotion through a computer is feeling disappointed that you can’t when others successful blaze away around you. Deutsch LA says the event went off largely without technical hiccups. “It’s never going to be flawless,” Binch argues. “It’s not going to be like with a pristine ad. This is live, and you’ve got to work through things in a real-time manner.” He is probably right. But tell that to my itchy trigger finger.
