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.
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.
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."
Those PS2 underwear ones are fucking wild
We need to go back. Everything now is too sterile. Publishers do not take any risks on games anymore. We don’t get games like Illbleed or Burnout from AAA funding anymore. Games that look at a genre and really ask what actually belongs in that genre.
Nowadays its all unoptimized Unreal Engine copy-paste Over the Shoulder perspective slop.
Indie is being more experimental these days simply because of how easy it is to develop video games now, but still lacks the necessary funding to create experiences on par with what AAA can offer.
Sony had some fucking weird ads back in the day.
I remember seeing these ads as an impressionable young gamer and getting the idea that Playstations had games that were scary and weird, and Nintendo games and handhelds were for boys. Generally the ads told me “this is not for you”. Because I only ever saw ads for specific PC games and never for PCs themselves, (they were aimed at adults, not in the kind of magazines and comics young me was perusing) even though I was still not the target market it clicked more with me. I think that might be a part of why I’ve only ever really gotten into PC games over the years. I knew there were games I’d like and games I wouldn’t, and never got the same platform level messaging.
I remember seeing an ad for Thief and thought it looked cool, and I remember being super grossed out by that Quake 3 ad, but I never felt unwelcome or out of place playing PC games. In contrast, the focus on marketing to young males is really obvious in those console ads.
Examples of some PC game ads I remember working for me and led to me getting them:
Now I’m curious what that Quake 3 ad was. Just lots of gore?
Kolanaki linked it above. It’s a disgusting crusty gamer den implying the game is so addictive you’ll live in filth. I remember that image being on the first couple of pages of a PC Gamer issue from the late 90s or early 00’s.
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.
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”.
Is that the edgy vibes that you miss, or just generic childhood nostalgia?
Everyone has it, me included. I miss playing Tekken with my brother, and comparing our progress in Sacred, and generally speaking, nerding together. We are both adults and employed, and he’s got two kids as well, now. We barely have time for a brief phone call to check on each other over the weekend :(
I think both.
Danger in that world was on the sidewalks and unintended. Danger in this world is on the main pathways the most, and intended by its administrators.
Edgy vibes of that time seemed more like when you reinforce your right to call a president of your country a little bitch. Or like how it wasn’t traditionally welcomed to physically punish kids in many cultures in the Caucasus - because teaching fear of punishment also piggybacks teaching fear of enemy. BTW, this was also a principle in Dragomirov’s writings on how teaching should be done in the military ; his approaches to actual warfare were kinda archaic even in his own time (basically “straight at them” bayonet shock attacks), but the parts on didactics are good.
The pop music I hated then and hate now.
So yes.
The nineties was the best decade.
Not low effort posting IMO, this is a part of our culture & has historical value.
Reminds me of this post on Bluesky. These ads were wild at the time, too; even some that predate this era. There was Fear Effect, which was basically marketed entirely on the back of the game featuring lesbians when that was taboo. There was Rayman standing at the urinals with a guy in 9-5 business attire presumably staring at Rayman’s dick. The Neo Geo “You need a pair of these” steel balls “to play one of these” ad. Plus the shockingly racist European white PSP ad; that was a billboard, not a magazine ad, but it had “video game magazine ad energy”, in this case with “(negative)” at the end of it.
Thank you sir, may I have another?
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?
The GBA SP really was a great portable. I carried my black\silver “executive” model everywhere and felt cool as shit at the time.
Those PS2 ads though, holy shit, what was Sony smoking back then?
They need to give it to the current marketing team. And save some for me.
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.
Thanks for sharing!
The Swedish GBA ad campaign is very unique!
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
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