- cross-posted to:
- gameart@sopuli.xyz
- cross-posted to:
- gameart@sopuli.xyz
This is probably going to seem wildly low-effort compared to my usual posts here, but I’ve found a bit of a treasure trove of print media gaming ads from magazines and sites. And they’re amazing. I found it so fun to see what companies used to do to promote their games.
Things have clearly changed a lot over time, some of them are insensitive or even outright sexist, but if you just look at it through a lens of being a time capsule, it’s fun.
This one’s going to be very image-heavy. If you’re using Boost on iOS then you might struggle to scroll through this (or maybe not? It’s happened with all my other posts though, so you’ve been warned), if that happens just visit using your browser :)
Game Boy Advance/SP:
The ‘feet’ collection were from an ad company in Stockholm, in 2005. I think it is to mean you’re using hands to play the GBA, and only have feet left to use for real life:
PS2:
Nintendo Game Cube:
And that’s that! Just interesting to see a time when gaming was a little more experimental and edgy.
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Nintendo advertising like this now is actually unfathomable
Might not be exactly vintage but it is getting close to 20 years old (ouch my age).
The Halo 3 advertising campaign.
And specifically this “Believe” video.
I cannot describe the emotions of excitement I felt for this game to be released. Waiting for the midnight release for this game is still one of my favorite memories haha. And once we got the game, the hours and hours of fun with friends… really was something looking back on it.
Halo 3 was peak.
I know some don’t like it because of some choices they creative team made that weren’t exact to the lore of the games, but I’ve been enjoying the Halo TV series. Had some moments that reminded me of the campaign and game series highlights. I’d say it’s worth a watch if you’re a fan - don’t be put off by the initial backlash.
I’m definitely old since, to me, “vintage” automatically means cartridge games.
Atari 2600
Really want to find GBA Tribal Edition in the wild—if it actually exists.
if it actually exists.
Its easily available, but I suppose by ‘in the wild’ you mean picking it up in a secondhand store, rather than online marketplaces. If not, have a look at buyee to pick up a bargain.
Interestingly they command a higher price than I expected on eBay.
Definitely exists. Still have mine.
Sony had some fucking weird ads back in the day.
It strikes me that I have no point of reference because I haven’t seen any ads for 20 years. If they stopped doing y2k edgy-style ads, what are they like now?
Lol, it strikes me that I don’t even know how they advertise games outside of blogs these days?
Streamers, news articles that are shared on reddit/SoMe and “leaks”
And I don’t think any of those require these kind of advertising images. I suppose that’s why we don’t really see them anymore
Those PS2 underwear ones are fucking wild
They had bizarre TV adverts as well. You could never accuse early 2000s Sony of not getting weird with it.
I don’t know if any of it really helped. It rode in on the already wildly successful PS1. It had a DVD player in it back when a DVD player was quite expensive. It had SSX and Tekken Tag at UK launch. It could play all your PS1 games and “upscale” them. The only competition it had at launch was the Dreamcast. It was going to sell anyway.
It also looked so cool and, a rumor had it, could run Linux (it could, but only the fat models and with a hard drive sold separately as part of a kit, and only a specific kind of Linux with Sony’s patches, and slowly as hell, but)
I think that was the PS3. They took it out later though, and had to give a paltry amount of money back to people who were using it.
It’d be nice to see homebrew coding return to consoles. Something like Godot ported to it and installed, kind of like Dreams but less limited.
I first got into programming via Basic on the ZX Spectrum, and I do worry how future generations will get into it now they’ve all gone back to phones instead of PCs.
No, the kit was for PS2, PS3 could run distributions intended for it without modifications, I think (maybe with some firmware changes), but those were by enthusiasts, while the PS2 Linux was provided by Sony.
I first got into programming via Basic on the ZX Spectrum, and I do worry how future generations will get into it now they’ve all gone back to phones instead of PCs.
Maybe the future generations will realize the difference between “can” and “should”, and there’ll arrive a niche for simpler PCs. I hope.
The nineties was the best decade.
Not low effort posting IMO, this is a part of our culture & has historical value.
Thanks for this one, a really valuable find:
Ironic!
This is the purple shade of the GCN, and its one of the ‘hero’ size images available to use, on SteamGridDB. I just liked to grab one image in that size to separate each ‘section’ in this post.
But…I know, it looks like an error -___-
I didn’t mean to be critical. I thought it was very funny actually.
The Playstation panty sniffer. Lol
The gameboy with the tribal tats is killing me.
I like the Nintendo ones, there were ‘risky’ ads here, now they’re very conservative
My thoughts exactly. Some of these ads are just plain weird in a way that they would never dare today.
They were always conservative. A few years before these ads Nintendo participated in Senate hearings where they advocated for censoring the entire medium. They just had a “fellow kids” period in the early 2000s. Luckily, judging by the sales of the GameCube, most people weren’t fooled.
Meanwhile, Nintendo in their rebellious youth:
Note: mario didn’t exist at the time, but i got this image from a news site that added it to censor the woman’s breasts.
I need the Winamp skin
Radical, as all your posts are. How the heck do you find the time?!
Oh this was nothing. My ‘news’ posts take me some time, and effort, which is why they’re kinda on pause right now (the 17th is when I see my specialist, get blood results, see what is next etc), so for now it’s this kinda thing - smaller!
But thank you so much, glad you enjoyed these :)
All the best to you!
It’s wild how crazy ads. The Mouse one for the GBA Micro still pops up into my head every once and a while. And my friend group still debates whether Mario is hiding a Tribal Tattoo somewhere
The foot for your distraught friend/partner in prison is cold, damn I like these old ad campaigns.
Tickle tickle!
What the fuck were the PS2 marketing team smoking?!
There’s more, but I suppose…back then shock was a tactic, the gaming industry wasn’t as clean cut and commercialized as it is now, and they were appealing to a certain demographic?!
Blame Nintendo.
Back in the early 1980s fresh off the video game crash of 1983, Nintendo was on the verge of releasing the Famicom in Japan, and needed a way to market the console in America.
There was just one rule. In America, video games were dead. A fad. Disco was dead, and so were video games. So it wasn’t a Famicom. It was a Nintendo Entertainment System.
In stores like Woolworths (think Walmart but not terrible) and Hills (think Target, but also a bit shady) they tried marketing the NES as an Entertainment system. It wasn’t a video game. It was an appliance. Like a VCR. It was the only way to get stores to agree to stock the damn thing. No store wanted the risk of a video game.
Well, after a year of selling, and research Nintendo found kids were the main target of their product.
So they shifted away from the electronics section and into the toy isle. There was just one problem. Toy stores in America were divided. Some isles carried toys for boys, and the other half of the isles carried the toys for girls.
A bit of market research showed that interest in Nintendo shifted slightly more towards boys. 55%‐45%.
What happens next is the key to the PS2 ads.
Nintendo chose to carry the NES in the boys section of the toy isles. Which had an IMMEDIATE influence over not only the marketing in America, but also the direction developers took their games.
There was a clear shift towards the games AND the marketing being geared towards boys 5-13.
Nintendo then DOMINATED the video game landscape. Seriously. If your mom today is roughly 80 years old, theres a pretty good chance she calls all video games “Nintendos” (regardless of brand), the same way she calls all tissues “kleenex”. Or if you’re from the south (especially Georgia) all soft drinks “coke”. Could be orange soda, it’s a coke. Just like it’s one of those Xbox 1080p Nintendos.
Well by the time of the PS2 days, that influence, even though Sony had nothing to do with it, had caked over. Video games were now very male centric, and the age range grew up with them.
In the late 80s, you were 5 years old playing super mario bros. In the mid 90s, you were 13 playing tomb raider and argueing with friends over the validity of a nude cheat code. And by 2001 you were 18 and horny, and…hey, look at these ads for the PS2. They’re edgy!
And that is my TedTalk on why raunchy dreamcast ads, and raunchy PS2 ads goes all the way back to the atari 2600 game crashing the whole industry worldwide 20 years earlier.
That, and puberty.
Good TedTalk. (Applause)
A bit of market research showed that interest in Nintendo shifted slightly more towards boys. 55%‐45%.
Need a source on this. The more appropriate action in those days with those numbers would’ve been to sell a blue version to boys and a pink version to girls.
I think Japanese companies didn’t care much about ad approval’s in foreign markets. Let them go a little crazy.
Probably creates by a group of middle-aged men who never touched a console.
People with no idea about the product who simply looked at the target demographics and thought:
"What do teenage boys like? Sex.
Let’s go with that since research is hard."
They’re smoking symbiotes.
