For a long time, perhaps because the medium was still in its infancy, there wasn’t a “right” way to promote home video games. As a result, some of the earliest video game companies – including some that we now recognize as major industry players, such as Nintendo – created some of the most bizarre TV commercials, print ads, etc strange memory condoms known to civilisation.
Video game ads were particularly confusing in the early 2000s, when ’80s babies were old enough to have warm and fuzzy memories of them Super Mario Bros. As a result, video game studios didn’t have to try as hard to recruit consumers as Sega did in one instance.I want You for Sega Master System”. TV spot from 1986. Techno-utopianism was also the 2000s basic aesthetic belief (as it is again today). All companies had to do was drown out the noise of *NSYNC and butterfly hair clips and remind you video games existed too.
“In no other form of society in history was there such a concentration of images, such a density of visual messages,” said art critic John Berger wrote about advertising in his seminal and ever-current 1972 book Ways of Seeing. “These messages may be remembered or forgotten, but briefly they are absorbed, and for a moment they capture the imagination either by memory or by anticipation. “
Video game companies wanted to extend this moment with you. They wanted their products to be viewed as essential but otherworldly, like the health elixirs and the obedient dragons that lived within them.
One easy way to do that was to scare you to death. If a video game was like lucid dreaming, a video game ad could be like sleepwalking through a black hole. So, back in 2002, Microsoft tried to give its then-year-old Xbox a reputation for memorable advertising, and it worked. That year the BBC received 136 complaints an original Xbox ad It shows a screaming newborn baby racing through the galaxy towards his future as a dead old man, eventually crashing into his grave.
“Life is short,” the ad said. “Play more.” (“It’s so gross it’s profound,” journalist Rob Walker wrote in slate at that time).
When the PlayStation 3 launched in 2006, the Sony brand was also synonymous with bizarre and even offensive advertising. “Annoying Playstation ads will keep you from playing video games forever” explained one gazers headline in 2008. “Let me try to paint you a verbal picture: It’s a guy with a thumb instead of a penis,” Hamilton Nolan wrote.
Yes, they really did it. But unorthodox advertising helped establish gaming as a lucrative and artistic industry.
The now $384 billion The global video game industry has primarilyoverwhelmed his need for lynch magazine campaigns and high shock value. That’s why we have Twitch streamers.
Aspects of weird video game advertising live on antagonistic social media brand accounts, but the mainstream video game industry is currently in serious adulthood. It wears button-down shirts and pretends it can’t remember its more eccentric days. But many of the ads created decades ago are too weird to forget — that was the whole point of it.
Here are some of our favourites.
