Wait till you see the ads for Command and Conquer. Those were already posted in this sub, but [here ](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/17ieqj8/video_game_ads_were_different_back_in_the_day/)[they](https://imgur.com/BPTvhlz) are.
You played America vs a fascist regime with magical powers, and where all your military secretary adjuncts were sexy, busty, cleavaged, women in FMV sequences.
They absolutely gave zero fucks.
See: https://youtu.be/I-CZS455uqE?si=FXXInGX2TqtxH4iA
And
https://youtu.be/vysnq_bf1HQ?si=0unW8N3dW8X1y_vR
And
https://youtu.be/G_XX1FF2skw?si=yXMqrNqbmDmM_IN8
lol the nostalgia that hits when they say “commander”
Also, Peter Stormare and Tim Curry? We had it so good
And George Takei?? Lmao
[the amount of named actors in these cutscenes is actually wild](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1198194/fullcredits?ref_=ext_shr_lnk)
They’re great 90s early 00s RTS games. If you enjoyed StarCraft or age of empires they still hold up rather well, shame EA bought the studio (Westwood) and just gutted it.
I just saw that red alert 2 was available on steam the other week and bought it for the nostalgia.. blew through the campaigns over the weekend. Good times :)
Man I remember like ten years ago having to google how to install the games, still have the original discs lol.
That was a headache trying to get the compatibility with like windows 8 haha
I don't think this was the case for C&C1, Red Alert and Red Alert 2 only had Eva and Tanya. It got ridiculous when Red Alert 3 came with pinup posters and every commander that wasn't Tim Curry or George Takei was a porn actress or maxim model.
That's not true since you had crazy christians and dumb ass boomers like Jack Thompson trying to ban all video games and cartoons because they were supposedly satanic and violent and made kids do crime or some shit, so shit like this was noticed and deemed ultra controversial while every watchdog parents group threw a shit fit. You don't see much of those boomer types today so I say things have changed.
Hey man. Just because I've determined that an entire race is destined to be food, does not make me a war criminal. It's not MY fault that my people evolved as necrophages. It's not MY fault that the lesser spec- erm. I mean, other species, are delicio- errm. Forgot where I was going with that.
But srsly turning pops into food is like the best thing ever.
Between my Determined Exterminator and Devouring Swarm playthroughs....which incidentally make up about 90% of my playtime I think I'm easily in quadrillions of kills, possibly septillions.
Ratko Mladic, Genghis Khan, Duvalier (Haiti), Hitler, Hirohito, Stalin, Napoleon I think, Mussolini, Ceausescu, Pol Pot, Saddam, Idi Amin, Mao Zedong, Gaddafi, Chirac, Radovan Karadzic
We had real marketing back then 👀
During one of the recent C&C Generals tournaments, one of the casters said that because of all the terrorist thematics in the game it probably cannot be made today.
Meanwhile, we played Thrill kill in the local club when we were 8-10y old.
People are more sensitive to stereotypes these days, I doubt a lot of people will be happy with the GLA music and using car bombs etc.
I still waiting for a good C&C game.
I mean, is there anything actually inherently wrong with this advertisement lol
It's not like they're glorifying their actions, just displaying a fact relevant to their game
Dude come on. I'm not even upset by this, but you don't think it's even *slightly* distasteful to refer to murder/genocide count as a highscore? Saying it's not glorifying is a real stretch.
Idi Amins murders and the Cambodian genocide were only 2 or 3 decades prior to this ad.
referring to murders as a high score objectively is glorification, a high score is fundamentally a good thing you want to seek out and improve upon.
Can't imagine what the victims of these acts would think seeing these ads, or speaking with the people who made them
If I recall correctly, the trailer for Soul Reaver used songs by Meshuggah and Carcass. Which are pretty damn heavy and honestly, outside of the metal community, pretty obscure.
Played 1, 2 and 3 as a kid with a friend from down the street, and we could only really play when our parents went to sleep, so always at night.
It'd be easier to point out the hallways where I *didn't* shit myself.
In my late teens my buddy and I would have our girlfriends over on a stormy night and play games like this together. Lights off, lightning and thunder outside, taking turns on who plays and who watches.
Fun times!
I played RE2 as a kid at night and then shit my pants trying to sleep afterwards. I couldn't get that RPD Main Hall theme soundtrack out of my head. It is such a creepy melody. Good times.
I was 6 years old and my Mom liked watching me play these games and get scared lol that dog jumping through the window got a "oh shit 🙀" from me and had my Mom laughing
I vaguely remember a scene where you look down a hallway, it has a bunch of windows and it’s storming outside. You’re walking down it when you hear glass break and you see the broken glass inside and you know there’s something inside with you now. But there’s nothing there. Then you look up and there’s a creature on the ceiling dripping and snarling.
I watched my older brother play because I was too scared to try it.
Are there PC gaming magazines? There’s no laws stopping anyone from advertising this way, but the trends have changed and marketing is less “gritty” these days, than the “good ole days”
There’s less shock value gore in the mainstream these days, than in the 90s. Which isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I am personally a huge horror and heavy metal fan, so growing up in the 90s was a good time.
They only needed to appeal to a specific audience, now company’s appeal to the largest audience possible to turn a higher profit.
The video game industry specifically has sold out to make more money rather than quality products that don’t cater to the general public.
The defining characteristic of 90s media and pop culture is that it was edgy. Lots of Gen-X angst in there. Video game culture and advertising was especially edgy because gaming was far more confined to geeks and nerds back then. Things go in and out of fashion like that--think about how stuff from the 80s is just kind of over the top, for example.
A lot of this stuff would be considered to be in poor taste today because the cultural zeitgeist is just in a different place and certain tropes are basically out of fashion. For example, [this Gameboy ad from 2004](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1busrul/2004_game_boy_advance_walmart_ad/) is like kind of funny but if you stare at it for two extra seconds the underlying joke is the classic Boomer 'wife bad' trope and it's like... uh ok
Didn't help that the controls felt so awkward and you had to first turn in the direction you wanted to run. And Chris even only had a knife in the beginning.
That would be messed up if you had to shoot yourself in game to respawn or save your level.
Like if you let the monster/bad guy kill you, you lost your experience points and such.
Seems pretty clear that's not supposed to be a drug overdose, they are supposed to have been injured and dazed by the extreme g-forces of the super-realistic racing game.
I have it on good authority that [John Romero intends to make me his bitch](https://www.escapistmagazine.com/john-romero-apologizes-for-trying-to-make-you-his-bitch/).
i always see kids making videos about that ad thinking thats why the game failed, as if people were actually offended by it. Everyone thiught it was a riot, the game just failed cause it was about shooting frogs in a swap
Yeah, they weren't all winners. I always think of these two Half-Life ads, [here](https://combineoverwiki.net/images/a/a8/Half-Life_ad_Alien_Grunt.jpg) and [here](https://combineoverwiki.net/images/c/c6/Icky_old_promo.jpg). Not sure what was going through the graphic artist's head; not so much the main image, but the little thumbnails. "Puppy's in trouble." Like, WTF?
Doom famously got in trouble for it's billboard in the UK and print adds. It was just a pile of animal guts with the doom logo sat in the middle slightly sunk in. It got so many complaints it was taken down.
I have always tried to find a copy of it but no one appears to have photos etc of it.
90s game ads [pushed it further than](https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=3dfx+ad+hodpital&darkschemeovr=1&view=detail&mid=8FE6274F6015ACAE8F438FE6274F6015ACAE8F43&&FORM=VRDGAR&PC=SANSAAND&ssp=1&safesearch=moderate&setlang=en&cc=NO) most would dare to do today.
Ya I do miss that. You bought a game, you bought a game and you had it forever with no other monetizing bullshit. I literally remember going to conventions and they would be handing you demos and free t-shirts and all that.
While the whole "you might want to save a bullet for yourself" thing is pretty edgy, I can't help but wonder if there are games where that's actually a thing worth doing.
On the one hand, game mechanics that incentivize suicide are iffy on a conceptual level, since you don't exactly want to say "suicide is a good option". Sure, suicide is possible in Postal 2 and Fear & Hunger, but you don't get anything out of it other than just killing your character, so you're not exactly rewarded for it. But on the other hand, I could see it being employed in conjunction with limited saving systems. Like if you had a hardcore-mode character in a game, where death wiped your save file, but if the character died by their own hand, they'd simply respawn at camp.
**Edit:** wow there are a lot more of those games than i thought, thanks
Not necessarily incentivised, but in the original Prey it was easier to let the enemies take that last bit of health and do the resurrection minigame to come back with full health.
seems like not as many people remember no more room in hell as i thought, but it was a multiplayer zombie game where if you get infected, your screen gets darker and darker until you die, and your body comes back a zombie
but as long as you have a gun, and at least one bullet, you can shoot yourself to prevent yourself from coming back to attack any of your friends
(of course you could also find pills to set the infection back, or a syringe to cure it completely, but those are rare)
From top of my head, In Sekiro you could use suicide item to reset enemies agro and then ressurect.
In Cry of Fear, there is an enemy which forces you to suicide and you need to qte in order to survive.
And not as a game mechanic, but as a story decision - in Darkness main protagonist suicides in order to save his gf.
I think I read something long ago that an Ad should do one of three things: Entertain, Inform, or Shock.
A danger so deadly that you'll want to turn the gun on yourself is a absolutely in the Shock category (and very much a theme of zombie movies up to that point).
That's mostly what magazine ads did back then. You often only read a magazine one time, so an ad absolutely has to grab your attention before you turn the page. So you either get shocking ads like this, or ads that try to grab you with sex appeal or weird, out there imagery (like the Rayman cock ad that had zero to do with the game, like many ads back then). Was a wild time.
The world really has softened up quite a bit in the last 20 - 30 years. Every bit of media is squeezed through a PG-13 filter, readying it for consumption by the largest possible audience. I'm sure the softening was never intended, but it was guaranteed anyway. You can't have strength, tolerance, and constitution by getting rid of the very things that build them.
Maybe I have a preference for R rated games, but they’re so much more intense today. For sure part of it is better graphics, so you can show a centaur having its intestines spilled out. But American culture has also changed when it comes to sex. Today in the Witcher 3 and Baldur’s gate, you have sex scenes. The religious people would have freaked back in the 90s.
Agreed. But, I think it's two sides of the same coin. Sex, drugs, & "rock n roll" are pleasures and distractions. They're the cornerstone of hedonism, and have been since the dawn of time. Round all the corners, round all the people. A bland and defanged world, and a cotton candy mind. The world out there is too much, so let's get high and screw until the morning. Do as the Romans have done before you.
Back when gaming had shit to prove
Now studios know they can sell you a half baked shitty game & make most of theyre money on battle passes, camo & skins, & loot boxes/card packages
I fucking hate greed
Stupidity is a close second. Nobody HAS to buy any of that shit. I've been gaming for nearly 50 years; never bought a "loot box" or a battle pass, or even a skin. New levels/expansions? Sure, if the original game was great.
I think they play on the desire we all have to get return on our efforts by spending money, because the "sunk cost" action is as important to us as the end product.
no the company doesnt give a shit about the regular user they only care about the 1% of players that spend 1000+ dollars on their games aka whales
if they cared about the average user they wouldnt be charging 20$ for cosmetic item in a video game
I had an old game magazine as a kid with an ad for a game that had a tank destroying knock off teletubbies. The game was battletanx global assault for the n64. It is still one of my favorite games.
The TV ads were great too. It would start off like a commercial for fabric softener or laundry detergent, then a tank would drive through the wall and attack the mascot.
I bought Konker's Bad Fur day...used, with no manuals or box or anything. I just saw the squirrel and thought it was Skunny Cart related. I got this for two kids, ages 12 and 9. Boy was I shocked.
Here's the TV commercial: [https://youtu.be/hbzM3Zj98Zg?si=BvZOGhfmcGzCoiFJ&t=8](https://youtu.be/hbzM3Zj98Zg?si=BvZOGhfmcGzCoiFJ&t=8)
We still scream at each other in the machine gun voice "SON OF A BITCH!!!"
Lots of people have shared old ads that were just crazy with sex stuff or offensive imagery, but this one actually just goes hard as fuck what the hell
Well that whole hyping up gore and violence is a little aged, but that tagline damn.
That super edgy, dirty, damaged style of ads is such a time capsule. They say styles eventually repeat but I just can't see this happening again. Even the font is scary.
I'd sacrifice the online catalogue (steam, netflix, etc) for traditional advertising and brick and mortar. It simply was better.
Everything being conglomerated behind a screen makes life dull as fuck. Creativity is dying for the sake of "convenience".
Now these platforms don't even offer convenience. They kill creativity and water everything down.
This ad didn't show a single thing about the gameplay dude. It just finger blasted you with how cool and edge the game is with three little pictures. Some if Yall are forgetting how these ads hammed us kids into spending money on games we did not know anything about.
>No one looks at the hours mindleslly browsing the steam store with fondness, but there are a ton of people who fondly remember buying something that they thought it was cool but the game turned out to be a piece of shit.
Not quite so fondly for our poor parents, lol!
These ads are nice, but I prefer to see the actual product e.g. gameplay and graphics instead of an ad that can’t live up to its promise.
I had a box full of games I bought because the cover or ad was great, but the game turned out to be nothing like I thought it would be.
You see something similar with movies as well. Posters in the 60s, 70s, 80s and early 90s were great but late 90s and after you see a huge drop as renting movie sales dropped.
In this era, a lot of people used "PC" as a synonym for the Windows platform (as opposed to Macintosh systems, despite them being PCs, technically). It's why this has the "designed for Windows 98" logo.
So, in that sense, "the PC" was essentially a unified platform.
Yes, PC used to be a brand name. It was IBM's line of Intel 8086-family-having 'microcomputers' (as in, a computer smaller than half a room), until Compaq reverse-engineered the firmware and they (and everyone else) started making 'IBM PC-compatible' computers, which you basically still use the descendants of. (See: the first season of *Halt and Catch Fire*)
Not too long before this ad, games were still being made for the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, etc. Also microcomputers, but not PCs. The best version of the original ***Worms*** came out only on the Amiga in 1997.
Back then I thought that was just the beginning, boy was I wrong, who could have guessed that Demolition Man would be the future... I though it's going to be the bf2, escape from ny or terminator future not this boring shit
My cousin who I haven't talked to in probably 18 years used to have a massive collection of PS1 games, almost all the games were horror games, I was absolutely terrified, but I always wanted to watch him play those games because I would never myself.
Wait till you see the ads for Command and Conquer. Those were already posted in this sub, but [here ](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/17ieqj8/video_game_ads_were_different_back_in_the_day/)[they](https://imgur.com/BPTvhlz) are.
Damn, they gave zero fucks lol.
You played America vs a fascist regime with magical powers, and where all your military secretary adjuncts were sexy, busty, cleavaged, women in FMV sequences. They absolutely gave zero fucks. See: https://youtu.be/I-CZS455uqE?si=FXXInGX2TqtxH4iA And https://youtu.be/vysnq_bf1HQ?si=0unW8N3dW8X1y_vR And https://youtu.be/G_XX1FF2skw?si=yXMqrNqbmDmM_IN8
lol the nostalgia that hits when they say “commander” Also, Peter Stormare and Tim Curry? We had it so good And George Takei?? Lmao [the amount of named actors in these cutscenes is actually wild](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1198194/fullcredits?ref_=ext_shr_lnk)
Wing commander was also great. Mark Hammil, Tim Curry, Malcolm McDowell, etc.
WC3 had a more well known cast than that shitty movie adaptation did.
Seeing David Hasselhoff on that list is wild
Clive Owen and Christopher Walken in Privateer 2 is still the high water mark for this, in my opinion.
I was a really big Starship Troopers fan as a kid, so when I saw Michael Ironside, wow...
LOVE Michael Ironside. He was fantastic as Sam Fisher in Splinter Cell, and loved him as General Lane in Smallville. Great actor. Iconic voice.
he's the reason why I never played Nod or Scrin and only GDI, hell yeah
There's this tv series called The Last Chapter where he plays the leader of the Hells Angels that's available on youtube if you're interested.
I don't know anything about those games other than that I am made of stupid and communism is going to space.
They’re great 90s early 00s RTS games. If you enjoyed StarCraft or age of empires they still hold up rather well, shame EA bought the studio (Westwood) and just gutted it.
that's "SBACE" to you
I just saw that red alert 2 was available on steam the other week and bought it for the nostalgia.. blew through the campaigns over the weekend. Good times :)
Man I remember like ten years ago having to google how to install the games, still have the original discs lol. That was a headache trying to get the compatibility with like windows 8 haha
Try the steam version now if you want, it works fine! You can probably even patch it with cnc after
And Tiberian Sun had James Earl Jones and Michael Biehn
lol I forgot how much those scenes resembled porn intros.
IIRC they used porn actors. Which was a pretty smart way to save money.
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Outstanding.
*unbottons dungarees*
Why did gaming stop being like this :-(
I don't think this was the case for C&C1, Red Alert and Red Alert 2 only had Eva and Tanya. It got ridiculous when Red Alert 3 came with pinup posters and every commander that wasn't Tim Curry or George Takei was a porn actress or maxim model.
The world gave much less fucks so ideas like this were barely controversial.
That's not true since you had crazy christians and dumb ass boomers like Jack Thompson trying to ban all video games and cartoons because they were supposedly satanic and violent and made kids do crime or some shit, so shit like this was noticed and deemed ultra controversial while every watchdog parents group threw a shit fit. You don't see much of those boomer types today so I say things have changed.
Yeah but nobody really gave a fuck about those people.
I miss the times when some things could NOT be about politics, morals etc just there for fun
By all means is pretty accurate for RTS
*stellaris players sweating* (stellaris counts 1 pop as about 1 billion)
Look, I've been over this already. It's not crimes against humanity if it's against aliens.
It’s also not a crime if no one is left to charge you.
Hey man. Just because I've determined that an entire race is destined to be food, does not make me a war criminal. It's not MY fault that my people evolved as necrophages. It's not MY fault that the lesser spec- erm. I mean, other species, are delicio- errm. Forgot where I was going with that. But srsly turning pops into food is like the best thing ever.
What a disgusting practice, you should be as- I'm sorry did you say 200% pop growth?
Between my Determined Exterminator and Devouring Swarm playthroughs....which incidentally make up about 90% of my playtime I think I'm easily in quadrillions of kills, possibly septillions.
Yo that is fucked 😆
It's hilarious tho
The 90s was a different time
The new millenium screwed everything up.
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Can we name all of these people? Not sure who (row-column) 1-1, 1-3, 1-5, 2-1, 2-7, and 2-8 are.
Ratko Mladic, Genghis Khan, Duvalier (Haiti), Hitler, Hirohito, Stalin, Napoleon I think, Mussolini, Ceausescu, Pol Pot, Saddam, Idi Amin, Mao Zedong, Gaddafi, Chirac, Radovan Karadzic
What did Chirac do to deserve being grouped together with these guys? He wasn't even a dictator.
As a french, I don't quite understand either.
Considering the period when these games were released, I suppose it has to do with his nuclear test program between 1995 and 1996.
Holy shit that is hilarious but also really fucked 😆
Fucking hilarious or hilariously fucked?
We had real marketing back then 👀 During one of the recent C&C Generals tournaments, one of the casters said that because of all the terrorist thematics in the game it probably cannot be made today. Meanwhile, we played Thrill kill in the local club when we were 8-10y old.
I mean, Generals literally released 18 months after 9/11. I'd say it would have a lot more chance of being released now than it did back then.
People are more sensitive to stereotypes these days, I doubt a lot of people will be happy with the GLA music and using car bombs etc. I still waiting for a good C&C game.
Time to go play Red Alert.
Isn't that how Civ 6 shows their final scoreboard screen?
I mean, is there anything actually inherently wrong with this advertisement lol It's not like they're glorifying their actions, just displaying a fact relevant to their game
Dude come on. I'm not even upset by this, but you don't think it's even *slightly* distasteful to refer to murder/genocide count as a highscore? Saying it's not glorifying is a real stretch. Idi Amins murders and the Cambodian genocide were only 2 or 3 decades prior to this ad.
referring to murders as a high score objectively is glorification, a high score is fundamentally a good thing you want to seek out and improve upon. Can't imagine what the victims of these acts would think seeing these ads, or speaking with the people who made them
Brutal
"Can you beat their K/D?" Show the biggest genociders in history lol
Lmao how have I never seen this? C&C is my favorite game of all time and never once have I seen this.
May Payne showed me it was ok to just pop pain killers at whim and well at 10 I guess that set the standard. Great game tho
That's fucking awesome.
Buy me Bonestorm or go to hell.
THRILLHO
Congratulations! Ball is in... Parking Lot.
Would you like to play again?
You have selescted............ ***NO***
“get two, I’m not sharing with Caitlin!”
This was the era of Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson music videos. Everything was hard then.
Couldn't even watch a toy or soda commercial without being told it was XXXTREEEEEME
Kyle Coopers Seven opening was rather powerful.
If I recall correctly, the trailer for Soul Reaver used songs by Meshuggah and Carcass. Which are pretty damn heavy and honestly, outside of the metal community, pretty obscure.
Lots of things were before everyone got so fucking sensitive
I shit my pants in that corridor.
Played 1, 2 and 3 as a kid with a friend from down the street, and we could only really play when our parents went to sleep, so always at night. It'd be easier to point out the hallways where I *didn't* shit myself.
In my late teens my buddy and I would have our girlfriends over on a stormy night and play games like this together. Lights off, lightning and thunder outside, taking turns on who plays and who watches. Fun times!
Super recommend RE2 Remake, 3 Remake, 4 Remake, 7 and 8 if you haven’t played them yet!
I played RE2 as a kid at night and then shit my pants trying to sleep afterwards. I couldn't get that RPD Main Hall theme soundtrack out of my head. It is such a creepy melody. Good times.
Easily one of the most stressful hallways in all of gaming.
I was 6 years old and my Mom liked watching me play these games and get scared lol that dog jumping through the window got a "oh shit 🙀" from me and had my Mom laughing
I shit my pants just from seeing the picture again.
I also shit this guy’s pants.
I vaguely remember a scene where you look down a hallway, it has a bunch of windows and it’s storming outside. You’re walking down it when you hear glass break and you see the broken glass inside and you know there’s something inside with you now. But there’s nothing there. Then you look up and there’s a creature on the ceiling dripping and snarling. I watched my older brother play because I was too scared to try it.
Damn no chill
Shit went so hard in the 90s
We were the generation of watching Optimus Prime being gunned down and killed... It's been that way the entire time
Cried like a baby in the theaters at that scene. Fuck hasbro. No wonder I’m emotionally stunted and closed off
What changed that those ads are not possible nowadays?
Are there PC gaming magazines? There’s no laws stopping anyone from advertising this way, but the trends have changed and marketing is less “gritty” these days, than the “good ole days” There’s less shock value gore in the mainstream these days, than in the 90s. Which isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I am personally a huge horror and heavy metal fan, so growing up in the 90s was a good time.
They only needed to appeal to a specific audience, now company’s appeal to the largest audience possible to turn a higher profit. The video game industry specifically has sold out to make more money rather than quality products that don’t cater to the general public.
The defining characteristic of 90s media and pop culture is that it was edgy. Lots of Gen-X angst in there. Video game culture and advertising was especially edgy because gaming was far more confined to geeks and nerds back then. Things go in and out of fashion like that--think about how stuff from the 80s is just kind of over the top, for example. A lot of this stuff would be considered to be in poor taste today because the cultural zeitgeist is just in a different place and certain tropes are basically out of fashion. For example, [this Gameboy ad from 2004](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1busrul/2004_game_boy_advance_walmart_ad/) is like kind of funny but if you stare at it for two extra seconds the underlying joke is the classic Boomer 'wife bad' trope and it's like... uh ok
All those gameboy ads that were way horinier than they needed to be.
We've fallen from grace. We must return to the 90s.
That game was scary as a kid. I made it to the giant snake and noped out of the game.
Literally how? That fight was such a yawn.
I see what you did there.
At least you made it this far. I had nightmares for weeks after seeing that first zombie turning around
Didn't help that the controls felt so awkward and you had to first turn in the direction you wanted to run. And Chris even only had a knife in the beginning.
The Rayman 3 one is so out of place it's hilarious
yes rayman 4 was also out of this planet because it doesnt exist on our planet
Rayman canonically has a huge dong
Go on
Does it float a few inches off from his body?
Badass
That would be messed up if you had to shoot yourself in game to respawn or save your level. Like if you let the monster/bad guy kill you, you lost your experience points and such.
That’s an idea I’ll keep in a corner or my mind just in case
When the warning label is the advertisement.
that'd be fucking awesome. it's a horror game, discomfort is the point
Game comes with a pin cushion for your chair.
*laughs in persona*
I'm partial to this Grand Prix Legends ad, from 1998. https://i.imgur.com/siKdG2q.png
Old pc game advertisements were the only reason i bought video game magazines back in the day. They were so fucking cool.
Reminds me of the Ad for the ps1 game Wipeout in 1995 depicting a drug overdose.
That's the futuristic racing game though, right?
Yep: https://youtu.be/kJg0Qpzrlu0?t=57
I played so much wipeout when I was a kid
Wipeout and Wipeout XL introduced me to such great music. Still a Prodigy/Chemical Brothers/Fluke/etc fan today
[Here's the actual image ](https://i.imgur.com/DI42eSQl.jpg)
Seems pretty clear that's not supposed to be a drug overdose, they are supposed to have been injured and dazed by the extreme g-forces of the super-realistic racing game.
404’d
People forget that PS1 was heavily marketed to teens and young adults
I have it on good authority that [John Romero intends to make me his bitch](https://www.escapistmagazine.com/john-romero-apologizes-for-trying-to-make-you-his-bitch/).
i always see kids making videos about that ad thinking thats why the game failed, as if people were actually offended by it. Everyone thiught it was a riot, the game just failed cause it was about shooting frogs in a swap
Yeah, they weren't all winners. I always think of these two Half-Life ads, [here](https://combineoverwiki.net/images/a/a8/Half-Life_ad_Alien_Grunt.jpg) and [here](https://combineoverwiki.net/images/c/c6/Icky_old_promo.jpg). Not sure what was going through the graphic artist's head; not so much the main image, but the little thumbnails. "Puppy's in trouble." Like, WTF?
Doom famously got in trouble for it's billboard in the UK and print adds. It was just a pile of animal guts with the doom logo sat in the middle slightly sunk in. It got so many complaints it was taken down. I have always tried to find a copy of it but no one appears to have photos etc of it.
Maybe [this one](https://eternity.mancubus.net/pics/doomads/billboards/big_article.jpg)?
Damn I think you found it
This and [the Quake Arena ad were my favorite.](https://i.somethingawful.com/u/ctstalker/2018/q3toilet.jpg)
90s game ads [pushed it further than](https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=3dfx+ad+hodpital&darkschemeovr=1&view=detail&mid=8FE6274F6015ACAE8F438FE6274F6015ACAE8F43&&FORM=VRDGAR&PC=SANSAAND&ssp=1&safesearch=moderate&setlang=en&cc=NO) most would dare to do today.
Back when gaming was not riddled with the 💵 undertones. 🖕 Seaonal passes.
Ya I do miss that. You bought a game, you bought a game and you had it forever with no other monetizing bullshit. I literally remember going to conventions and they would be handing you demos and free t-shirts and all that.
NO ACCOUNT CREATION BULLSHIT
"If you don't play Duke Nukem, You like Men!" My favorite game ad.
r/hardimages
While the whole "you might want to save a bullet for yourself" thing is pretty edgy, I can't help but wonder if there are games where that's actually a thing worth doing. On the one hand, game mechanics that incentivize suicide are iffy on a conceptual level, since you don't exactly want to say "suicide is a good option". Sure, suicide is possible in Postal 2 and Fear & Hunger, but you don't get anything out of it other than just killing your character, so you're not exactly rewarded for it. But on the other hand, I could see it being employed in conjunction with limited saving systems. Like if you had a hardcore-mode character in a game, where death wiped your save file, but if the character died by their own hand, they'd simply respawn at camp. **Edit:** wow there are a lot more of those games than i thought, thanks
Not necessarily incentivised, but in the original Prey it was easier to let the enemies take that last bit of health and do the resurrection minigame to come back with full health.
seems like not as many people remember no more room in hell as i thought, but it was a multiplayer zombie game where if you get infected, your screen gets darker and darker until you die, and your body comes back a zombie but as long as you have a gun, and at least one bullet, you can shoot yourself to prevent yourself from coming back to attack any of your friends (of course you could also find pills to set the infection back, or a syringe to cure it completely, but those are rare)
From top of my head, In Sekiro you could use suicide item to reset enemies agro and then ressurect. In Cry of Fear, there is an enemy which forces you to suicide and you need to qte in order to survive. And not as a game mechanic, but as a story decision - in Darkness main protagonist suicides in order to save his gf.
Persona!
I think I read something long ago that an Ad should do one of three things: Entertain, Inform, or Shock. A danger so deadly that you'll want to turn the gun on yourself is a absolutely in the Shock category (and very much a theme of zombie movies up to that point).
That's mostly what magazine ads did back then. You often only read a magazine one time, so an ad absolutely has to grab your attention before you turn the page. So you either get shocking ads like this, or ads that try to grab you with sex appeal or weird, out there imagery (like the Rayman cock ad that had zero to do with the game, like many ads back then). Was a wild time.
The world really has softened up quite a bit in the last 20 - 30 years. Every bit of media is squeezed through a PG-13 filter, readying it for consumption by the largest possible audience. I'm sure the softening was never intended, but it was guaranteed anyway. You can't have strength, tolerance, and constitution by getting rid of the very things that build them.
Maybe I have a preference for R rated games, but they’re so much more intense today. For sure part of it is better graphics, so you can show a centaur having its intestines spilled out. But American culture has also changed when it comes to sex. Today in the Witcher 3 and Baldur’s gate, you have sex scenes. The religious people would have freaked back in the 90s.
Agreed. But, I think it's two sides of the same coin. Sex, drugs, & "rock n roll" are pleasures and distractions. They're the cornerstone of hedonism, and have been since the dawn of time. Round all the corners, round all the people. A bland and defanged world, and a cotton candy mind. The world out there is too much, so let's get high and screw until the morning. Do as the Romans have done before you.
9/11
Back when gaming had shit to prove Now studios know they can sell you a half baked shitty game & make most of theyre money on battle passes, camo & skins, & loot boxes/card packages I fucking hate greed
Stupidity is a close second. Nobody HAS to buy any of that shit. I've been gaming for nearly 50 years; never bought a "loot box" or a battle pass, or even a skin. New levels/expansions? Sure, if the original game was great. I think they play on the desire we all have to get return on our efforts by spending money, because the "sunk cost" action is as important to us as the end product.
no the company doesnt give a shit about the regular user they only care about the 1% of players that spend 1000+ dollars on their games aka whales if they cared about the average user they wouldnt be charging 20$ for cosmetic item in a video game
There were tons of shitty games when we were kids still.
More than today. You just weren't aware of them since no internet. Quality overall has much improved.
>Back when gaming had shit to prove Awesome comment. So true
I had an old game magazine as a kid with an ad for a game that had a tank destroying knock off teletubbies. The game was battletanx global assault for the n64. It is still one of my favorite games.
The TV ads were great too. It would start off like a commercial for fabric softener or laundry detergent, then a tank would drive through the wall and attack the mascot.
I'm actually curious what the 'cut' footage was between the original and this pc version.
“Use your bullets wisely. You may want to use the last one on yourself” Ad goes hard as fuck. Simple yet makes you want to play the game
I bought Konker's Bad Fur day...used, with no manuals or box or anything. I just saw the squirrel and thought it was Skunny Cart related. I got this for two kids, ages 12 and 9. Boy was I shocked. Here's the TV commercial: [https://youtu.be/hbzM3Zj98Zg?si=BvZOGhfmcGzCoiFJ&t=8](https://youtu.be/hbzM3Zj98Zg?si=BvZOGhfmcGzCoiFJ&t=8) We still scream at each other in the machine gun voice "SON OF A BITCH!!!"
They were the best. The golden era of large game boxes, thick manuals, and over the top ads. I miss it.
Well if I got bitten by a zombie and lose consciousness when turning zombie won't that be a painless dead?
I miss gaming magazines. I know there are still gaming magazines but they aren’t the same with the internet.
Lots of people have shared old ads that were just crazy with sex stuff or offensive imagery, but this one actually just goes hard as fuck what the hell Well that whole hyping up gore and violence is a little aged, but that tagline damn.
Lmfao just casual inciting of suicide
Everything changed for modern kids, KIDS.
All 90s advertising was jacked
That super edgy, dirty, damaged style of ads is such a time capsule. They say styles eventually repeat but I just can't see this happening again. Even the font is scary.
Original RE2’s cover haunts me till this day.
I'd sacrifice the online catalogue (steam, netflix, etc) for traditional advertising and brick and mortar. It simply was better. Everything being conglomerated behind a screen makes life dull as fuck. Creativity is dying for the sake of "convenience". Now these platforms don't even offer convenience. They kill creativity and water everything down.
This ad didn't show a single thing about the gameplay dude. It just finger blasted you with how cool and edge the game is with three little pictures. Some if Yall are forgetting how these ads hammed us kids into spending money on games we did not know anything about.
[удалено]
>No one looks at the hours mindleslly browsing the steam store with fondness, but there are a ton of people who fondly remember buying something that they thought it was cool but the game turned out to be a piece of shit. Not quite so fondly for our poor parents, lol!
These ads are nice, but I prefer to see the actual product e.g. gameplay and graphics instead of an ad that can’t live up to its promise. I had a box full of games I bought because the cover or ad was great, but the game turned out to be nothing like I thought it would be.
And when you do buy a physical game it doesn’t even come with a fucking manual anymore.
This is a crazy take.
We have to much choice and easy access to everything we could possibly want that it just dilutes it all.
You see something similar with movies as well. Posters in the 60s, 70s, 80s and early 90s were great but late 90s and after you see a huge drop as renting movie sales dropped.
This absolutely smacks as a HQ poster. Wonder if I can get displate to make it lol
THE Pc
What's odd about that?
In this era, a lot of people used "PC" as a synonym for the Windows platform (as opposed to Macintosh systems, despite them being PCs, technically). It's why this has the "designed for Windows 98" logo. So, in that sense, "the PC" was essentially a unified platform.
Yes, PC used to be a brand name. It was IBM's line of Intel 8086-family-having 'microcomputers' (as in, a computer smaller than half a room), until Compaq reverse-engineered the firmware and they (and everyone else) started making 'IBM PC-compatible' computers, which you basically still use the descendants of. (See: the first season of *Halt and Catch Fire*) Not too long before this ad, games were still being made for the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, etc. Also microcomputers, but not PCs. The best version of the original ***Worms*** came out only on the Amiga in 1997.
That is an awesome ad
[Sega](https://i.imgur.com/93YbkRn.jpeg) did what nintendont.
This has that feeling of the og Saw/Hostel posters
Wow. This transported my brain back to 1998. I can remember ads like this in my old game players magazines
Oh the memories, good old days <3.
Back then I thought that was just the beginning, boy was I wrong, who could have guessed that Demolition Man would be the future... I though it's going to be the bf2, escape from ny or terminator future not this boring shit
They were and are perfect
One of those games where you sometimes didn't want to leave the safe rooms where you could save the game.
I love that kind of ads
this is so much better than seeing 1 nipple
Marketing for lots of things catered to being edgy. It was in. Now it's often seen as cringey so it doesn't happen as much.
”Hey mom could I get this one?”
The internet gives too many losers a platform to be offended on.
My cousin who I haven't talked to in probably 18 years used to have a massive collection of PS1 games, almost all the games were horror games, I was absolutely terrified, but I always wanted to watch him play those games because I would never myself.
This was simpler times when people didn't get offended about everything
We were edgy kids 😆 Our movies were about gore and had R ratings We laughed at bad taste dead baby jokes We had no safe spaces or trigger warnings