Nothing was off-limits for retro game ads

I can imagine. I'm glad this is less prevalent now. Seeing it now in middle age makes me go ick. I wished I had been much more aware of this kind of sexism as a boy.

It's not really nostalgic for me, TBH. It's actually kind of embarrassing that marketing like this existed and that it worked. I love T&A as much as the next female-loving guy, but ads like this are condescending. But again, they sold units...

Yeah. Even just around a decade ago I'd explain the demographics shift to more women gamers to clients and they'd not believe it.

Stereotypes stick around for a long time, even when (or maybe especially when) untrue.

It's a shame that "girl gamers" were considered such a rarity when it really seemed like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

"Oh, a game with only male protagonists with activities only primarily associated with boys doesn't have many girls playing it? I guess girls aren't that into games and we should double down on the focus on dudes."

As a result, the market effectively abandoned around half of two generations of a potential continued audience and had a significantly reduced pool of interested labor to make games.

It's a bit frustrating given my love for games that they could likely have advanced even further had it not been an exclusionary industry for as long as it was (though that can be said about pretty much every business vertical in existence too given our generalized collective history of exclusion).

I was a senior in high school at the time and even back then I thought this kind of advertising was crass, gross, and unnecessary. No nostalgia here, just second-hand embarrassment.

Yeah as a boy I didn't like these either. They were sexy but made me feel a little weird. I was young enough not to realize it was targeting only boys, but now that I'm older I think that's why I didn't like them. I wasn't in to sex at the time.

I was hitting puberty, this was prime material

You and me both, but to be fair it's a year closer to the creation of console gaming to modern day. So I'll let it pass.

People who call my music vintage or classic can get right the fuck back, though.

Hate to break it to you, but they play rock from the 90s and 00s on the CLASSIC rock stations now.

Bro, we lost that fight. I was watching a Youtube video of a guy clearing games from his Steam backlog and introduced one with, "So, many of you watching probably weren't alive when this game came out. Everyone talks about what a classic this is, but I don't think I've met anyone who has actually played this game."

I died a little inside when it turned out he was talking about the first Half-Life.

Hell, I can remember when the word retro meant something new inspired by something older. Now it just means old / classic.

You mean the late 1900's

Bro, 2010 is retro now

I understand saying you don't feel like 2010 is retro, but 1998? That's been retro for a long time. You're in a really extreme place in your head when you stick to not calling something that's 25 years old retro.

If you really want to get depressed, Farmville is probably retro for some people.

If in 1998 you would have argued that 1972 is retro, then I'm sorry to tell you that 1998 is retro

The thing that gets me about the Tomb Raider reboot is they toned down the sex appeal, but apparently graphically brutalizing Lara is perfectly okay.

Sexy Lara: Sexist!

Beating the ever loving shit out of Lara: Not sexist!

Characters with big breasts must be inherently sexist, or else we can't explain why characters who used to have big breasts now need to have them toned down.

However, it's perfectly okay if the supposedly feminist prequel you're going to release has references to the female player character being about to be sexually abused if you lose, because nothing speaks about female empowerment like threatening the player with turning their character into a SA victim if they don't play well enough.

and he was at a urinal right?

Oh my god, this is dark.

Hahaha, yeah, that one was great.

Also the one where they paid parents to name their baby 'Turok.'

I sometimes wonder what those little Turoks are up to today (at least a half dozen parents took them up on it IIRC).

The shock advertising campaigns around games really were something. They worked - got a ton of free media coverage. But this was also at the time that video games were the Boogeyman like rock n' roll had been to a generation before. The media loved nothing more than a "look how terrible video games are" story and PR firms were playing into that environment.

So campaigns like this were basically the equivalent of Ozzy Osbourne biting the head off a bat.

As games became more normalized, the campaigns shifted accordingly and - like Ozzy - tamed quite a bit out.

He can't do it without his friend Superfly.

Not if you're a literalist exec that saw the creative and didn't think it was clear enough - "where's the target audience? How are they going to see themselves in this ad?, she's clearly out of our average user's league"

Is there a high res version of this anywhere?

Im still a little bit miffed they didn't give me any compensation for using pictures of my setup