Games@lemmy.worldbyPerfectDark@lemmy.world
11 months

Vintage gaming advertising pictures: a gallery

lemmy.world English

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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    • Pika@rekabu.ruEnglish
      11 months

      This is probably going to seem wildly low-effort compared to my usual posts here

      My man, you just compiled tons of obscure posters from the corners of the Internet. I admire your dedication, and this does take an effort.

      • PerfectDark@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11 months

        *Miss, not man!!!

        (I’m just glad people enjoy all this weirdness as much as I do!)

        • psycotica0@lemmy.caEnglish
          11 months

          Hmmm… for reasons I cannot justify my brain is telling me the equivalent for “my man, you really blah blah blah” should be “madame, you really blah blah blah”

          Though I agree you can’t correct someone by being like “ahem, it’s madame actually” 😛

    • NONE@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11 months

      What the fuck were the PS2 marketing team smoking?!

      • PerfectDark@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11 months

        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?!

        • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11 months

          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.

          • zaphod@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            11 months

            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.

      • Xerxos@lemmy.mlEnglish
        11 months

        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."

    • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.socialEnglish
      11 months

      There is only one magazine video game advertisement I really remember from seeing in the wild in an actual magazine, and that was the Quake 3 Arena one of a computer in a crusty-as-fuck basement bathroom in front of a toilet with just a super dirty setup.

    • muusemuuse@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      11 months

      I’m surprised you didn’t post that PSP ad with the white lady beating the shit out of the black lady…to promote the sale of a white PSP.

        • tatterdemalion@programming.devEnglish
          11 months

          OK this cements my belief that people who work in marketing are batshit insane.

          Even after seeing backlash, they doubled down and kept running the ad.

          • dustyData@lemmy.worldEnglish
            11 months

            It’s all the cocaine. When I watched madmen I thought it was an exaggeration. Then I dated a guy who worked in marketing and met his coworkers.

    • Fizz@lemmy.nzEnglish
      11 months

      The gameboy with the tribal tats is killing me.

      • PerfectDark@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11 months

        I like the Nintendo ones, there were ‘risky’ ads here, now they’re very conservative

        • WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11 months

          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.

    • Valmond@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11 months

      The nineties was the best decade.

      Not low effort posting IMO, this is a part of our culture & has historical value.

    • I Cast Fist@programming.devEnglish
      11 months

      I wish there was an easy way to quote/reference specific images. Golden Sun literal fire was nice, but those PS2 ads were… What the fuck

      • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
        11 months

        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.

    • Aielman15@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11 months

      The over-the-top edgy/“how do you do, fellow kids?” vibes of the early y2k years is definitely something that I don’t miss from that era.

      I can somehow hear Linking Park in the distance while scrolling this post.

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11 months

        Funny, I miss that exactly. The feeling of spring\summer air and the fragrance of jasmine\lilac\linden\freshly mowed grass and the clouds, and ICQ animations with cats scratching your screen and “hasta la vista baby” and all that, and the Web when it was actually hypertext on hundreds of pages hand-crafted all with real people.

        And yeah, going to friends to play Tekken, and them coming to play SW: RotS. Watching “A Nightmare on Elm Street” in a summer camp. Older girls watching “Charmed”.