Hello everyone ^^
Thanks to everybody who participated in my first post, I hope it helped to create a bond between you and your memoirs about videogames, that´s what history should do I guess. Anyway, this week’s question is: Which is the coolest videogame ad you remember seeing on tv? (if you´re too young you can answer with the coolest videogame ad you saw on the internet but it must be an audiovisual ad)
Mine´s has to be that Atari Jaguar infomercial which I found some months ago, I´ll link it below cause it’s just SO COOL.
Remember that I´ll be reading all of your replies. ^^
Thanks once more and I´ll be seeing you next week, have a marvelous night.
Literally nothing. Videogames (Santiago, CL) weren’t big (at least for ad stuff) when I was growing up or even until a few years ago. In fact, I remember clearly being kind of amazed by seeing game ads on the street or on buses (FIFAs or this cyberpunk one that was a huge flop which I just forgot the name) here in the UK.
Tough question to answer. I feel like I arguably live through the golden age of video game advertising which is probably the period including the end of 8-bit, the entire 16-bit era and the original PlayStation and into the PS2 eras. So it’s a hard question to answer. I don’t know if I can pick an absolute favourite. However, I did enjoy this series for Ratchet and Clank. What are very likely Jackass inspired, these ads involve of a bunch of friends testing out weapons from the games resulting in obvious mess ups, accidents, explosions and other shenanigans. They were silly yet very well executed.
Masterpiece, or desperation that happened when Nintendo tried to play catch-up to Sega’s advertising tour-de-force in the 90s? I think maybe the latter.
Potentially true, the world does seem to love itself some fatphobic content. In retrospect, it probably contributed to the fact that Yoshi’s Island is one of my least favourite SNES games because I found that ad insufferable.
This is the ONLY gaming ad I can remember, so it is also the best one. It’s from the 90s and it makes no sense. I could not tell back then if it was a movie or a game and what kind of game. I also did not understand why it was called ZELDA when it was about someone called Link and I thought Link was a girl and maybe ZELDA was the dragon.
Is there even a dragon in the game?
The best about this is the guy “rapping”, because the text is so … I have a hard time to describe it … cringy. Like an old person wants to sound like a hip teen/rapper of the 90s.
Unfortunately I can’t get the cringe across, it sounds way too reasonable in my translation:
Super Nintendo’s latest hit is called Zelda, and it will sweep you away.
Adventure, action, black magic, dragons and monsters and fantasy. Dive into this magical world and fight like Link the superhero.
Save the princess from the dragon’s claws and chop off the dragon’s head.
Just when you think you’ve reached your goal then a creepy reptile makes you mobile again.
Show what you can do, stand your ground like a (real) man, because Zelda really turns you on.
Zelda and the unbeatable world hits, only for Supernintendo.
Probably one reason why my parents thought gaming was only for boys and too violent or had too much sex in it and kept me away from it.
On the other hand that ad has survived the time and can be watched on Youtube only because it was so cringy that most people remember it, so it was a good ad I guess.
Same as El_Diegote, videogames were a relatively niche thing in my country (Mexico) so it was unthinkable to see ads of them until recent years. I remember that one of the first and coolest videogame ads I watched was God of War: Ascension “From Ashes”, it was really good:
The SNES version of A Link to the Past was before my time, but I loved Ocarina of Time and the Seasons & Ages games so when I saw this on TV it blew my brain away.
I still think it’s super dope. They could repurpose this commercial and just change the game to Elden Ring on a Steam Deck and it’d be just as applicable!
Just recalled that THIS is most likely the first ad I ever done seen.
EDIT: After writing this I realized the thread is asking about video games so video game consoles don’t count. Video games were practically banned in China so I can’t remember seeing any ads.
I am going to talk about the ad of the my first game console mentioned in the previous post, because that was the only legitimate (in the sense that parents approve of, it was still an illegal clone of NES) game console when I was growing up in China.
As mentioned in the previous post, this company Xiaobawang 小霸王 made a smart marketing move to brand the NES clone as a machine to teach kids how to use computer (“the machine of the future”). The ad is basically going along this line. Jackie Chan is starred in the ad. The lines run like this: “when I was young I used fists to conquer the world, but now it’s the computer era, my son will use Xiaobawang learning machine to conquer the world.”
Wow, I´ll love to learn more about videogames and its relationshio with China, I´ve heard it´s kinda problematic due to their economy politics. Thank you for your participation. ^^
