The Best Worst Ads Redux

I had written about some bad Video Game Ads before.  And today I got a heads up that Scott Sharkey “just published a third installment of this feature, and the ads Scott Sharkey found, (and scanned, and humiliated) are every bit as awful as they were in installments past.”  So I came I saw… and I ran screaming in wonder.  Why did were these marketing people allowed to work in gaming?

There’s always a little guilt that goes along with digging up really awful adverts and poking fun at them. There are just so many, and they’re all so ridiculous. It’s not even shooting fish in a barrel. It’s like dynamiting frogs in a Dixie cup. Thankfully, when they’re bloodsucking frogs that want our money, it’s not hard to make way for that animal torturing twelve year old who lives in all of us.Where our first installment focused on EGM ads of the late 80s, and our second installment on EGM ads of the early 90s, this time we raided the Games For Windows vaults for late 90s issues of Ye Olde Computar Gaminge Wyrld. The result? Even more insanity. Read on to see what we mean.

Where our first installment focused on EGM ads of the late 80s, and our second installment on EGM ads of the early 90s, this time we raided the Games For Windows vaults for late 90s issues of Ye Olde Computar Gaminge Wyrld. The result? Even more insanity. Read on to see what we mean.

They are bad, and as Scott Sharky goes through them, you really see the idiocy of some marketing teams. He has a way of really pointing out the obvious, for example:

For: Advent
From: Advent
Appeared in: CGW, November 1998

Or maybe we’ll just declare them trendy. Apparently mostly naked chicks were the big thing for moving PC audio gear in November 1998. Er, not that using sex to sell crap was such a recent phenomenon. It’s just that there are too many wild connections to make here. Unreal sounds better with these speakers. I got that, but what the chained up slave girl has to do with either Unreal or high fidelity audio completely escapes me. More likely that this photo was a reject from some completely unrelated ad campaign for… I dunno, date rape drugs or whatever…while the marketing hivemind was realizing that gamers don’t get laid enough. I know, that’s pretty far out, but you’d be amazed by the crazy stuff in this industry. I hear there’s actually some guy getting paid to complain about naked women in ten year old speaker ads.

So break down and see how bad some of these ads are, what’s amazing is the fact that some marketing teams ended up doing more then one marketing campaign… before finally shutting down the company. So read on about some of the worst Video Game Advertising you’ll hate yourself for viewing again.

Tags: Advertising, Gaming, Humor, Interesting, Irony, Review