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- cross-posted to:
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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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The Playstation panty sniffer. Lol
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.
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.
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.
Good TedTalk. (Applause)
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.
Those PS2 ones are fucking awesome, thanks!
Half of that ad budget went to cocaine for sure.
love that a lot of their ads were just “be fucking weird and surreal, then people will look, and BAM! PS2 logo.”
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
I loved the Golden Sun ad. Literally how little me felt playing that basic ass fantasy game. Basic but still love it.
I’m surprised you didn’t include this one:
Edit: Link to creator:
I just wanted to have actual, official ones shared!
This one is not official, it was done by a girl who goes by shy smith three years or so ago, she just tried her best to make a photo in the ‘style’ of the old Y2K era, and the days of PS2 ads and…everyone ended up believing it was real. She did such an amazing job of it, this one often gets shared as if it were done for Sony.
And…to be fair, the actual official ones got way worse than those I included:
Oh god how is that meant to boost PS2 sales 😂😂😂
Are you sure? That’s just a nude girl in the background. Where are they getting away with that?
France did the ‘panties’ ads, there were three of them all up.
Here is another which has explicit exposure, this one from Chile has exposed breasts, also. And far more obvious to the viewer
Heh this post blew my mind twice in one package: I was definitely one of those that believed it was a real ad. I distinctly remember some discussions about the sexualized nature of it or not. So as you said, super well done.
But secondly, the official ad you posted instead has three nipples at once? And one male two female on top? That almost seems weirder to me.
this isn’t low effort. These are freaking great!
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.
To be fair, an indie dev just tossing stuff together on the weekends and evenings has everything needed in these accessible game engines to build a AAA title of 15+ years ago.
I would argue that is not true. I don’t see many Indie games that match AAA games from 2010 in polish or content, honestly. Maybe there are a few, but I cannot think of any off the too of my head. Most are like AAA of 25+ years ago.
On a technical level it may be achievable that an Indie game matches a 2010 AAA game, but I think mechanically speaking that has not happened yet. Indie games have a hard time even matching the content and polish of 20 year old games from 2005. Where is the Indie Resident Evil 4, or Elder Scrolls III Morrowind? Some Indie games try to compete, but they either aren’t polished enough, look like they released in 1999, or are too short in content to compare to those games.
That Tainted Grail game that just came out this year is supposedly the indie Elder Scrolls. Maybe you’d argue that’s AA, but that’s still a symptom of how our standards have shifted. Games like Resident Evil are also abundant these days; not so much like Resident Evil 4 in particular, but RE4 was an experiment that split the difference between old Resident Evil and modern third person shooters.
I only bring up RE4 since it released in 2005. Morrowind is even older at 2002. My point was more that there aren’t any indie games that match the content or polish of those games, as old as they are.
Its mostly a limit of indie in general. Not enough money or time to match AAA games of even 20 years ago. AA absolutely should be at minimum matching 20 year old games, but even the funding AA gets should be enough for AAA games from 2010.
That’s what I was trying to say is they have everything they need mechanics-wise built into these game development environments. The difference between AAA and indie is more on the scope of how much artwork, sound design, writing, voice acting, Foley work, etc. goes into the game
A solo independent developer can pretty easily recreate the mechanics of GTA V in Unreal for example, but they can’t realistically recreate a selectively compressed representation of the entire LA and San Bernardino counties plus a 14 hour (or however long it is) single player campaign
Itch.io Has some fantastic games :)
One of my favorite (that works on the SP!): https://tangramgames.itch.io/tobu-tobu-girl-deluxe
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
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.
*Miss, not man!!!
(I’m just glad people enjoy all this weirdness as much as I do!)
My apologies, I missed that one!
deleted by creator
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” 😛
The kirby choking one has to become a meme template !
Whatever we gained by losing these, it was not worth it.
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.
me pullign out the playstation Condoms
The gameboy with the tribal tats is killing me.
I like the Nintendo ones, there were ‘risky’ ads here, now they’re very conservative
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.
My thoughts exactly. Some of these ads are just plain weird in a way that they would never dare today.
I need the Winamp skin
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.
