21h ago

Vintage gaming advertising pictures: a gallery

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.

91 comments

The gameboy with the tribal tats is killing me.
- I like the Nintendo ones, there were 'risky' ads here, now they're very conservative
  
  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

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.
- It feels VERY Quake-esque, too. So they nailed that image!
- Wow this is incredible, thanks for sharing. I find it funny that Nintendo fostered their famiy friendly appeal seemingly right after the GameCube and GameBoy Advance. Those particular ads are saucy.
- "go 'way! ~~baitin~~ gamin!"
- Thanks for sharing a hidden memory of mine. It's badass

PS3 did some wierd shit, too.
And PSVita... The PSVita had this:
- I hate to say it actually depicts the concept pretty good
  
  I never saw this ad and i tell you it took me until my fourth game before i found out about it...i was mind blown

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!
  
  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" 😛

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.
  
  I think Japanese companies didn't care much about ad approval's in foreign markets. Let them go a little crazy.
- Smokin that whoopi goldberg south egyptian fur burger deluxe megamillion scratcher skunk bubba kush
  
  They're smoking symbiotes.

I'm surprised you didn't include this one:
Edit: Link to creator:
https://xcancel.com/notshysmith/status/1407072918945812481
- 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 😂😂😂
  
  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 serialized 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.
  
  Are you sure? That's just a nude girl in the background. Where are they getting away with that?

Whatever we gained by losing these, it was not worth it.

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)

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."

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.

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.
- Never heard of this ad since i was a kid at the time and not Dutch. Here it is.
  Wow.
  https://www.polygon.com/2017/4/5/15190396/sony-psp-ad-white-is-coming-pepsi-kendall-jenner
  
  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.
  
  See they should have done a Charlie's Angels type thing, have them standing kind of back to back like they're on the same team. But I guess that won't have been as controversial.

The kirby choking one has to become a meme template !

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 :(

Radical, as all your posts are. How the heck do you find the time?!
- Oh this was nothing. My 'news' posts take me some time, and effort, which is why they're kinda on pause right now (the 17th is when I see my specialist, get blood results, see what is next etc), so for now it's this kinda thing - smaller!
  But thank you so much, glad you enjoyed these :)
  
  All the best to you!

this isn't low effort. These are freaking great!

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

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"

The nineties was the best decade.
Not low effort posting IMO, this is a part of our culture & has historical value.

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.

Thank you sir, may I have another?

I've seen Pokemon condoms but I don't think they were licensed, fortunately none of them said "gotta catch em all" though

Nintendo advertising like this now is actually unfathomable

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.

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

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.

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:
https://cdn.mobygames.com/promos/18308445-thief-the-dark-project-magazine-advertisement-pc-gamer-usa-issue.jpg
https://www.retromags.com/rmg_fs/gallery_imgs/monthly_2022_06/large.1061174590_LordsofMagic02(December1997).jpg.82c9c4e56622e154a87711d93647ccc3.jpg
https://cdn.mobygames.com/promos/6568546-the-elder-scrolls-iii-morrowind-magazine-advertisement-pc-gamer-.jpg

The foot for your distraught friend/partner in prison is cold, damn I like these old ad campaigns.
- Tickle tickle!

That Spider-Man box for Gameboy Advance gave me serious nostalgia. I never owned the game but I think because I saw it dozens of times behind the glass at Walmart growing up. I haven’t seen it in years. Back when they had the controllers out so you could stare up and give yourself wild neck pains from playing games while mom shopped.

Thanks for sharing!
The Swedish GBA ad campaign is very unique!

Thanks for this one, a really valuable find:
- Ironic!
  This is the purple shade of the GCN, and its one of the 'hero' size images available to use, on SteamGridDB. I just liked to grab one image in that size to separate each 'section' in this post.
  But...I know, it looks like an error -___-
  
  I didn't mean to be critical. I thought it was very funny actually.

Love the PS2 ones. They almost have a Goth vibe in their aesthetics.
- I thought "gnostic vibe", but yes.

man those Tribal GBA SPs. yeah I remember when Nintendos advertising in the US was way more edgy. like when the GameBoy Pocket and GameBoy Color came out the commercials for those were dark.

I have to admit, the GBA SP was pretty hot. I still have mine.

Use protection. Buy ps2.

Really want to find GBA Tribal Edition in the wild—if it actually exists.
- if it actually exists.
  Its easily available, but I suppose by 'in the wild' you mean picking it up in a secondhand store, rather than online marketplaces. If not, have a look at buyee to pick up a bargain.
  Interestingly they command a higher price than I expected on eBay.
- Definitely exists. Still have mine.

I'm definitely old since, to me, "vintage" automatically means cartridge games.
- Atari 2600

Carpeted bathrooms are cursed.

91 comments