Last April I watched all of season one of Lost over the Easter long weekend. I jumped right from season one to recorded episodes of season two. I got sucked in, big time.

After I started watching and became "in the know" of some of the various entities within the show, I started seeing and hearing references to a bunch of them in real life, having real/fake websites and actual books, commercials for the fictional companies on ABC, appearances on TV shows like Jimmy Kimmel's show, and that sort of thing.

I wrote about it at the time that like in A Christmas Story when Ralphie spends three months forcing himself to drink Ovaltine every morning to save up the Proof of Purchase labels so he could get a Little Orphan Annie Secret Decoder Ring. When it finally arrives and he decodes the secret message they read out at the end of the episode, it turns out to be an ad for Ovaltine, and the poor little guy is crushed.

I posited that The Lost Experience was going to be the exact same thing: one giant suck-in for their advertisers. I was right, of course and the big "winners" were Verizon, Sprite, Jeep and Monster.com. I saw a link to a TV blog this morning on Digg that spelled out the game in recap format and goes on to say "It could be argued that the word "sprite" was used more in the aggregate of game dialogue then the word "Dharma".

So there you go. People playing the "game" spent hundreds of hours on it, only to have a crappy ending that smacked of leaving the door open to a sequel, and the advertisers got hundreds of hours (per person, so that's gotta be a couple million hours in aggregate) of product placement.