Game advertisements have evolved several million times over the last few decades, but no matter how cool they get, there’s always going to be some terrible ones. Here are a few of the worst:
 

Gameboy

WHAT IS THIS NIGHTMARE

Ah the Gameboy. Not much you can really find fault with it. When you’re one of the most successful portable consoles of all time, you can’t easily sit back and point out chinks in the armor. Plus, EVERYONE loved the Gameboy. It is a certifiable fact that if you didn’t, you most likely had a heart made of pure ash and dead animals.

One place you can cast a glaring eye isn’t with the Gameboy itself, but Nintendo’s “edgier” advertising that they started doing in the 90s. Sega had been thoroughly trashing them for a good few years with their awesome “SEGA!” ads, which went out of their way to paint anything with Nintendo on it as a baby’s first electronics toy. Nintendo seemed to have enough of this around when the SNES came out, and decided they wanted to do some “I’M ALL UP IN YOUR FACE MOTHERFUCKER” ads too. Only this obviously wasn’t Nintendo’s strong point, and the ads we got were mostly things you would be more accustomed to seeing in an issue of Fangoria. Dismembered heads, eyeballs, body parts, all done in a way that was more than mildly uncomfortable to the kids they were pitched at. In short:

Sega’s ads were cool and humorous.

Nintendo’s ads were more like that one kid in school that would do the grossest shit ever because he knew you’d watch him do it.

And even though we may have been watching, it sure as hell didn’t mean we liked what we were seeing.

This ad is pretty tame compared to some of Nintendo’s finer ads of the time, but still, when does any of us want to see a two page spread of hideously colored tongues that isn’t in a porn magazine? Is this supposed to make me want to purchase a Gameboy? Is it supposed to be entertaining? Am I supposed to be like “OOOOH I get it! How clever!”. That may be what it’s supposed to do, but I did none of those things.

Instead, I turned the page.

Thankfully, Nintendo did the same a few years later with this ad campaign.
 

This Shit

I'd still take the Saturn

Seriously, did ANYONE ever win anything from this shit? If you recall, it was literally in every magazine back in the day. Featuring all this amazing technology (Check out that sweet N64!), and it could all be yours IF you could solve their simple assed word puzzles. Anyone now can see that it’s an obvious scam, but back then being a kid, seeing all of that on that page and knowing it could be yours was a pretty tempting thing. It’s kinda sad to think how many kids this company cheated out of what little money they got.

Digging around reveals little about the mystery company behind all of this; Pandemonium Productions. There are several Pandemonium Productions listed on Google, but none that seem to be responsible. Unless Pandemonium Productions is now doing High School Musical promotions for Disney, though I’m willing to bet even Disney would know to stay away from the guys responsible for the above.

Anyone know anything about this thing? Anyone else try it? If you did, you can at least feel slightly better knowing you weren’t the only kid that lost ten bucks.

Aura Interactor

Wait, what?

One of the things that marketing type people enjoyed doing in the early nineties was to make their advertisements almost totally impossible to read, I guess in an effort to make their ads feel more “cool” and have “attitude”. This is a perfect example of such an ad, because I have been sitting here for the last five minutes just trying to figure out how the hell to read this advertisement. The lines all seem to be inserted at random, and I have concluded that the writing at the top and left side of the ad was written by some type of highly retarded alien race.

The ad is actually for Aura’s Interactor accessory, which if I remember correctly, would shatter your ribs and give you severe internal injuries if you actually used it. It was basically a giant subwoofer you would strap to your chest, and when a particular moment happened in a game, the Interactor would kick in, and begin beating the holy fuck out of you until your Mom heard your screams of pain and turned it off, or until it flew off your body and vibrated around the house at alarming speeds.

The rest of the ad features more text going in various directions, and a picture of a kid with a crosshair on him, which probably signifies he is about to die in some way. Yay for excellent marketing!

C3D Imaging System

OH JESUS MY BOWELS

It’s weird to see how 3D is sorta making a comeback these days – complete with 3D glasses even. Recently we had My Bloody Valentine in theaters all decked out for 3D viewings, and you’re also hearing how most new LCD TVs are coming out with 3D technology built in. It’s insane how a shitty old gimmick can somehow be brought back to the forefront of tech, when it’s still just as much of a gimmick now as it was then.

So what the hell does that ad up there have to do with this? Well, that just happens to be the C3D Imaging System from waaaay back in 1997. It’s supposed to make any video signals “jump out at you” with “awesome visual depth” while you “look like a supreme goober wearing those hella freakish glasses”. Okay, so that last part wasn’t in there, but holy shit just look at those things.

And you know what? It’s the same basic technology being brought back into the limelight these days. Only I’m gonna guess things didn’t go so hot for the C3D Imaging System.

Also you geHOLY SHIT IT’S A GIANT FUCKING WOLF COMING OUT OF THE PAGE RUN TO THE CAR.

Air Cars

Shit

This ad just so happens to be for a game called Air Cars, which if I am lead to believe this ad, has something to do with air cars. For all I know, this game could have been the finest game ever crafted, but thanks to this ad, all I can gather is that this game did not have enough money to hire any type of design artist, and instead was forced to rely on a friend of a friend to produce the mind-shattering artwork in this ad. What you see is one of the air cars featured in the game, on a total path of destruction, laying waste to anything that should get in it’s way. Basically, this is what the ad wants you to believe. What you actually see is what happens when some 14 year-old kid gets an airbrush, drinks ten cans of Mountain Dew, gets totally extreme, and this is what he produces.

Whether it’s the tagline done in giant flames, the air streams coming out from underneath the air car signifying that it is in fact, on air, or the air car itself that looks to have been built out of an old Atari, this advertisement screams out awfulness. It’s not really surprising that air cars didn’t exactly make a huge splash when it was never released, probably because most people would think this ad would be more of a strange prank than an actual game. But, I guess we can all dream.

Kool Aid Man

Classic...but still bad

I’m sure all of us should know what Kool Aid Man on the Atari 2600 is all about by now. The absolutely terrible “free” game you could acquire by sending in twelve(!) UPC symbols from various boxed foods. In all, your free game ended up costing more than a full price Atari game, and all you ended up getting was a barely functioning game that sort of worked if you wished hard enough for it to. It was terrible.

The ad doesn’t do much to instill confidence in you, though it does totally make me want to drink some Kool Aid. It’s a solid ad, and it damn well should be when you’re partnered with the finest powdered sugar drink on the market. It’s just unfortunate the game turned out to be pure dog shit. Just imagine how awesome it would have been to get a cool assed game in the mail. Even if you did end up paying a total of 74.50 for it. We’re kidafter alls , we forgive easy. Especially if the game is good. But not only did we get kicked in the balls with purchasing far more Pop Tarts than we ever wanted, but we also got a bad game.

And no ire is greater than that of a kid that feels he got cheated on a video game.

Don’t believe me? The video game market crashed like a year later.

Don’t fuck with us.
 

Turbo Touch 360

It may have been battle tested, but it sure wasn't logic tested

You may remember the Turbo Touch 360 Gamepad. Not only because of it’s revolutionary claims and features, but also because those revolutionary claims and features were total lies. And also because it was advertised in every video game magazine for seemingly several eternities. The Turbo Touch 360 claimed to be the end all, be all gaming pad, since it’s claim to fame was that it finally solved the problem for us gamers too lazy to actually press the buttons on the controller. Instead, the Turbo Touch finally gave us a controller that we really didn’t even need to touch, and at the same time permanently destroying muscles and bone structures in our thumbs.

The ad itself is showing you how much easier it would be to play Mortal Kombat if you used the Turbo Touch, instead of the standard game pads. This may actually be true though, since Mortal Kombat’s most complicated of moves only required you to press left and right on the controller, until your character flew across the screen, or produced some type of move which caused blood to come on screen. I’m sure the Turbo Touch could handle this, and would actually be of an advantage, since the thousands of particles in the air that would cause the lasers to sense movement would most assuredly turn your character into some sort of special move super seizure machine machine of infinite death, effortlessly throwing out moves at random. Either that, or it will just scare whoever you are playing against enough until they just get up and leave and never speak or make eye contact with you again.

Even though the Turbo Touch advertised for years and years, it never did really take off, and if i remember correctly was actually sued by some kid that ended up straining his thumb playing with it. Or it could just be some weird urban legend. The kind of Urban Legend that I make up in my head whenever I need to justify writing about such a useless device.