Killer Instinct (SNES)
A clear sign that games had grown up since the innocent Colecovision/Cosmic Ark times, this Killer Instinct ad showed that the SNES could jack the f***adilly directly into your brainstem, so hard that even your mom had to be bleeped. Take that, Sega’s edgier image!
Sunset Riders (SNES)
Ignoring the galloping arcade machine for a moment, Sunset Riders’ commercial gets props for actually showing a decent amount of gameplay footage when it could have just as easily dressed a couple drunk midgets in cowboy drag and put them on a carousel shooting cap guns at each other while a horrified old woman in too much lipstick shields her grandchildren’s leering eyes.
Conker’s Bad Fur Day (N64)
Did she just pull a fortune cookie out of her bra? As the 90’s wore on, games and game advertising continued to age up as the first generation of kids raised on videogames became disorderly teens and twentysomethings ravenous for tits, blood and swear words to put in their digital vice machines.
Noxious cross-promotions
NES/Toys R Us
Screw your locally owned toy shop and get your sweet ass to MegaCorp, Inc! Because a healthy global economy depends on putting all the mom and pop stores out of business, AMIRITE?? It’s just hard to believe that Toys R Us would state such a diabolically evil agenda so literally and shamelessly. That aside, what a cool dad! He totally turns into Metroid, jumps like Super Mario and will do anything to get his boy a NES. Finally, a parent who gets it!
NES/Pepsi
Skip right over that worthless pile of fruits and vegetables, which have zero Nintendo content on them, and head straight for Pepsi Mountain which has the power to turn Mario into Santa! Now we’re talking! If all the corn syrup and caffeine doesn’t stunt your growth and give you ADD, perhaps the free videogame swag will. This, ladies and gentlemen, is how the Cold War was won.
See you next week, comrades.
Jun 11, 2009
This week's videos document the casual games invasion
The gameplay free edition
New game movies that made us happy, made us sad or just made us confused
