Nothing was off-limits for retro game ads

Honestly, might be nostalgic for guys, but as a girl who was playing games in this era, it made me feel like I wasn’t a part of the culture, rarely if ever were there ads marketed towards me, but man were there a lot of half naked ladies. Glad we don’t do this as much, but god this caused a lot of younger girls to feel ashamed of playing games “for boys”.
- It really sucks looking at the detrimental effect this had on gender ratios in gaming to this day. It's gotten a lot better but it's still not there yet.
  
  Yeah, we need to level the playing field by having half naked sexy guys on the cover of games. ^please
- 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.
- The weird thing is, as a guy, I never even paid attention to the sexualized stuff in games. To me these are like two different brain activities. So, as far as I'm concerned, there was never any point in this kind of marketing. I've never in my life purchased a game because it featured sexy ladies.
  
  It's supposed to be subconscious, like with most marketing. It hits the animal part of the brain, rather than the thinking part.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- There were lots of half-naked men, too. Including in this ad.
  Most of them in games were more male fantasy stuff...ripped, shirtless dudes with big weapons. Not really appealing to most women, but checks the "I want to BE him" aspect for lots of guys, lol
  
  Yeah, but that is just another facet of marketing for men. Sexy dress-up vs tighty whities. Definitely not intended to get women interested.
  
  Are you really out here in public view still trying to use the "not all men" to tell a woman her feelings are invalid?

This kind of marketing ruined gaming culture.
There is a throughline between gendered marketing; the idea that young hetero men owned gaming; and chud gaming culture like gamergate.
The idea of the young horny gamer dude is sexist toward men too. Never mind the accompanying stereotypes of gamers as loosers and nerds.
- cough big bang theory
  
  Nerd blackface.

I'll fight anyone who says 1998 is retro. I'm getting old, but give me a few more years damn.
- Those few years between 1992-1998 were as .. game-changing .. for games as probably the two decades that followed. We started it with side scrollers, Dune and Doom and ended it with Diablo II, StarCraft and Half-Life.
  For the kids here who haven't experienced Half-Life, you should play Black Mesa. For the retro farts who have played Half-Life, you should also play Black Mesa. It's the Half-Life you couldn't have in 1998 because of the slow hardware. I weeped from feels playing it.
  
  Blizzard used to give me such warm fuzzies.
  
  I spent sooooooooo much time on StarCraft and Diablo II. First video game I remember playing was Wolfenstein 3D, then Duke Nukem. Found RTS soon after.
  
  Old fart here. I played Wolfenstein 3d, then played the shit out of Doom and Duke Nukem 3d but missed out on Half life until recently. Knowing the context of the era it came out in, I can totally see how amazing it must have been. Hell, it's still incredibly fun for me in this era.
- 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.
- Bro, 2010 is retro now
  
  You are a bad person.
  Why must you be so hurtful.
  
  We're gonna have to rethink definitions at some point. Yes, video games are still a comparatively new medium, but nobody would call a 2010 film a retro film, nevermind books or paintings.
- If in 1998 you would have argued that 1972 is retro, then I'm sorry to tell you that 1998 is retro
  
  No, you're retro! runs away sobbing
- You mean the late 1900's
- Bro that's so last century
  
  Last millennium, even.
- Hell, I can remember when the word retro meant something new inspired by something older. Now it just means old / classic.
- 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.
- 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.

Oh, man, you have NO idea:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2002/mar/15/games.advertising
- Oh my god, this is dark.
- Bro, using ads in the graveyards this is new for me...
  I bet this will make a comeback...
  
  https://youtu.be/zyVG5FNsOkw?si=e-wBfpHxa67ttqIJ
- This would've been great for a game like DOOM.
  
  [Here lies your loved one]
  "Ah! Fresh meat! Journey into Tristram and see what the Butcher is up to today!"
- Please be the onion....
  
  Sorry, but Acclaim really was that wild for a bit there. They also had a promotion where you'd get a free copy of one of the Turok games if you named a newborn child after him. For what it's worth, I don't think anyone took them up on either offer, but it certainly brought in the publicity.
- 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.
- Best played with a DeathAdder mouse.

The early 00s was pretty mysoginistic.
I originally came from a conservative country, and yet there were plenty of ads for softcore porns in TVs and billboards in those days. Even as a child, I questioned why do they show such images in front of full view to everyone.
The thing is, such mysoginy was the norm without us even realising it. I remember reading an article of a woman reminiscing her college days in early 00s. There were pictures of college girls on pin up boards and they get graded on how beautiful they are. The author said no one thought bad about it but looking back, it was very degrading and also invading privacy. There was also the matter of the infamous wardrobe malfunction of Janet Jackson. She got all the public spotlight afterwards because she is a woman, but Justin Timberlake pretty much got away with it for free. JT also shamed Britney Spears about losing her virginity to him, instead of keeping his mouth shut, while Britney was branded as slut.
- I'm sure in the 2040s, people will say the 2020s were misogynistic too. And they'll be right. Equality isn't here yet.
  Progress always seems to mostly march onwards, but you only have to watch Beverly Hills Cop 2 to see Eddie Murphy calling Brigitte Neilsen "that big bitch" like it was perfectly acceptable. And even that was probably considered pretty forward thinking at the time having a woman being cast in an action role, rather than just being fucked or fridged like pretty much every other 80s action movie.
  
  This. The funny thing is some folks think that progress just happens. The amount of people who died or ruined their lives in the name of progress is baffling to me.
- The Man Show was on air for 6 consecutive seasons starting in 1999. Their premier episode featured Adam Carolla and Jimmy Kimmel sitting outside trying to get people to sign a petition to end women's suffrage (as a joke, bro. Obviously it's a joke!)
  
  Was that not just to take advantage of the fact that "suffrage" sounds like a bad thing (like "suffering")?
- yeah the whole Janet Jackson thing wouldn't have happened today

My favorite old school game ad is one for Quake 3 Arena:
- https://i0.wp.com/boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/quake_is_for_everyone_german_.jpg?resize=600%2C413&ssl=1
  This German ad for Quake is awesome too!
  
  Ah, fun for the whole family. Very wholesome, that Quake game is.
- Is that a toilet chair?
  
  "The tryhard poopsock"
  
  It's one of those things, yes.
- And people make fun of that one ad where John Romero was going to make us all his bitch.
  
  To be fair, Daikatana sucked so the ad is mostly funny in retrospect because it didn't make everyone his bitch. If it had, I'm not sure we'd be making fun of it.
- 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

I thought they were cringy even then.
- I was hitting puberty, this was prime material

Yep, those were different times.
Battlecruiser 3000AD. This advert was later revised and they drew black knickers on the model.
Psycho Pigs UXB. Another British classic?
- Well-placed censorship of pictures was the best purpose of a Battlefield 3000AD box. That was one of those games where the drama around it was far better than the game itself.
  
  Isn't this the game that had to run full page adverts claiming a new, updated version was available and "the bugs have been squashed!" Obviously this was pre-internet, so updates like this were quite uncommon.
- Now i want to see the reviews for Psycho Pigs UXB because it cant have been very memorable.

- Holy fuck, where to start haha

Dreamcast ads got real weird. I vividly remember this one ad for Seaman: It showed a pair of feet and a fish tail sticking out from under a blanket. The accompanying text was "I will not mate outside my own species " repeated several times.
- They knew what they were doing when they named it.
- Wt absolute f.
  Was this like mermaid fetishization?
  
  Seaman was bonkers. Look up a video of it, or better yet just emulate it. It's one of a kind.

Am I the only one cringing at the perspective in the mirror more than literally anything else in the ad?

I can’t even process what’s going on with the reflection in the mirror being from an angle at about head height over the bed. I like that they didn’t even trust teen gamers to understand the allusion of a woman standing in a bedroom doorway without comping in this extra element.
- In order to make the reflection work the bed would have to be angled against the wall.
  It's funny how the brain instantly notices that the perspective is nonsensical but can't really pinpoint the issue ^^
  
  It'd also need to be pressed against the mirror I think....?
- 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"

They were going with a "sex sells" approach to marketing, but what they got was just an unrelatable and cringe piece of 90s trash.
- Never played it, did they fuck up the triangles?
  
  That shiny green top is definitely not as sexy irl

but why is he wearing a diaper?
- No kinkshaming please...
- Do not use a black light in that room.

I'm still waiting for John Romero to make us all his bitch.
- He can't do it without his friend Superfly.

Is there a reason they used the "You wouldn't download a car" font?
- Gen X edgy font?
  
  The entire design is just janky somehow.
  Also, do y'all remember the time Arby's of all people used this concept for an ad? It was a TV commercial, we see a guy waiting on a bed and hear a woman's voice from the bathroom "This is really what you want? Well I'm only doing it once." and she comes out dressed as an Arby's cashier with a tray of meat sandwiches.
  
  Hmm, 1998. Is that Gen. X or Millenials? Makers are Gen. X, target group probably Millenials.
- Default late-90s design intern font.
- Tomb Raider 3 came out in 1998. Well before the anti-piracy campaigns.

and above all - sexy new outfits
The most important part of a game.

This one is newer: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-j9f95EJaTHg/VNBkM0cJhCI/AAAAAAAARzs/wIzGSSJkiCo/s1600/alison-carroll-kick-1210867833.jpg
- That's not an ad. That's just some cosplayer showing off her muff.
  
  No, no, no, this was from 2008 and the "release" of the new LC model: https://www.ign.com/articles/2008/08/15/lara-croft-i-presume
  They actually went with this photo (and others), but have since moderated themselves
  
  Holy shit you're spot on.
  She'd be teenage me's dream Chung Li.
  Edit; adult me would be fine with it too

Man, 90s video game ads were wild lmao

Media today might be less sexist but I think part of it is also that it became drastically more sex averse. Mortal Kombat is gorier than ever for anyone to see, but god forbid anything shows a nipple.
- 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.
- 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!

It took me a couple seconds to understand that it wasn't a before/ after set of pictures. It was a little confusing.

I recommend this Mastodon account for more retro ads: https://botsin.space/@gamemagprintads
- This is great! Followed.

Since she's a a Tomb Raider, a dungeon crawler, a spelunker, does that mean he wants her to peg him? Color me interested.

The Rayman one was great, "small man, huge features" iirc :d
- and he was at a urinal right?

Fun fact Tomb Raider was the first game with a nude mod.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_content_in_video_games
  Tomb Raider came out in 1996
  
  I did a search on that page for "mod" and didn't seem to get any relevant hits. What were you referring to?

I remember TR3 was a huge disappointment after 1 and 2. The new mechanics weren't very good and the level design was more confusing. I remember they added the Desert Eagle pistol and it was a giant brick (seriously the model consisted of probably 3-4 polygons total).
It really felt like they were just milking the franchise at that point.
- milking lara croft? 🤔
  
  let's not kink shame...

Pretty amusing to see what they were up to with ads.
I guess it really was a different time back then where people were able to laugh about things instead of being uptight and serious.

Why does she looks like Aphex Twin?
- Come to daddy
  
  Come to Daddy

My cock is lost in the jungle and it's up to you to find it~~~ Oh Laura, no panties... You know I like it like that...
- I can't believe you came on my mom

It was a super gross and embarassing era.

The 90's were just better.
People could have a joke and a laugh without everyone being so serious about everything and getting offended.
- I've been joking and laughing with people for decades since then (today even), and nobody was all serious or offended!
  And it isn't even with a group of old white men all the time! Lol
  
  The world has got far more serious.
  My comment was obviously exaggerating for effect. You'd have to be stupid to think I meant there are no jokes anymore.