Video game ads used to be very weird. While these days they largely focus upon graphics, online multiplayer or how many hours you’ll be able to spend ignoring your family, friends and adult responsibilities while playing them, back in the ’80s and ’90s they routinely went off the rails in order to cater to the newly pubescent teenage boy demographic. Every company from Sony to Nintendo got in the act, playing to our deepest fantasies or, in many cases, simply creeping us out in order to linger in our collective memories.
Though gaming ads now largely stick to a set criteria — an epic, cinematic score accompanied with a shot of a grizzled protagonist with his/her back to the camera, overlooking a deadly warzone/tropical vista/post-apocalyptic wasteland — just a few decades ago marketing companies hadyet to crack what most appealed to their audience. This led to a plethora of truly batshit crazy ideas being utilized, with some proving to be successful while others… not so much.
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With that being said, let’s take a look at some of the ads that fall into the former category. Here are the worst video game ads in history:
Worst Gaming Ads of All Time
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Neo Geo
There are a lot of retro ads that imply the player will reject sex with beautiful women after buying a new console, but this one ranks above them all in terms of sheer awfulness. Note how the man is holding the Neo Geo's cumbersome controller above his pelvis in order to make it look like he's twiddling his penis, while a phallic-shaped monster is displayed on the TV in the background.
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Daikatana
Daikatana was a disaster on multiple levels, but this ad in particular will go down in history as one of the very worst pieces of video game marketing. Doom creator John Romero was one of the biggest names in gaming prior to Daikatana's release, so he decided to place himself at the forefront of its marketing campaign by insisting that he was going to make players "his bitch." Unfortunately, not enough people bought Daikatana to adequately assess whether this statement was true or not, with it being one of the gaming industry's biggest commercial flops ever.
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PS Vita
Sony has a habit of producing ads that skirt the line of offence, and the marketing for the PS Vita was no different. Featuring a woman with two pairs of boobs, its slogan "Touch both sides for added enjoyment" unnecessarily excluded potential female buyers of the handheld console, though this would unfortunately be only the second most offensive Vita ad the company produced.
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Battlecruiser 3000AD
During the '90s scantily clad women were used to sell just about everything, including intergalactic trading simulators. Battlecruiser 3000AD's "sexy" marketing didn't encourage anyone to pick it up, and this ad was later revised to show the model wearing underwear and not covering her genitals with the game's box.
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Sega Saturn
The Sega Saturn didn't do so well, but according to this ad for the console its processing power would make you forget all about boobs when you feasted your eyes upon its graphics. Unfortunately for Sega this wasn't the case, as everyone promptly forgot about the Saturn and everyone still remembers boobs.
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Atari Jaguar
The Atari Jaguar was an abject failure and proof that plugging your console with power isn't always the key to victory. Atari's ugly marketing, complete with the insistence that you'll "blow chunks" while playing it (which is a good thing, apparently?) failed to get it off the ground.
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Game Boy
Nintendo is now much more kid-friendly when it comes to its marketing, but a few decades ago they were very much in the business of putting out "edgy" ads to rival the likes of Sega. This one is particularly questionable, as not only does it seemingly depict a euphemism that doesn't actually exist, but it also implies sexual activity between a young man and his rodent. Yeah, we'll pass, Nintendo.
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Sega Genesis
Masturbation was somehow a popular domain for advertisers back in the late '90s, as if the target demographic of teenage boys wasn't doing enough of that already. This ad for the Sega Genesis was one of the more unsubtle attempts at comparing buying a new console with furiously jacking off.
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PlayStation's anniversary
Sony decided to anger religious groups in Italy with this ad marking the tenth anniversary of PlayStation, with its translation reading "The Passion of PlayStation" while a man is depicted wearing a crown of thrones. After a wave of controversy, the company was forced to pull the ads.
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PS2
Sony produced a ton of eye-catching ads for the PS2, but among the console's memorable marketing campaign were a handful of duds which disturbed consumers more than it did convince them to part with their cash. This skin-crawling ad is one of them.
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PS2
Taken from the same abstract PS2 marketing campaign, no one really knows what Sony was getting at with this image of a woman giving birth to a grown man. Was this supposed to make people want to pick up Tekken Tag Tournament, or just gross them out enough that they'd buy a PS2 to prevent Sony from marketing the console?
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PSP
Arguably the most offensive video game ad ever created, this PSP billboard may have been trying to sell the handheld console's new white color variant, but in reality it looked like a call to arms for white supremacists. Sony was inevitably forced to pull the ad.
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Rayman 3
Rayman is now best known for starring in two of the very best platformers of the past decade and -- ugh -- the Rabbids, but around the launch of Rayman 3 Ubisoft was hard at work trying to instill in us the idea that their limbless mascot was packing serious heat.
