"Star Soldier", NES, 1986.

I've set aside October for scary game ads, but I suppose all game ads are scary in their own way. This one is especially scary to the legal department, in the event that they are sent a letter from 20th Century Fox regarding their use of the xenomorph from the film Alien.

WATCH FOR THE HIGH SCORE CONTEST!

Now that you've shot down a few...
Here's your chance to see one up close.

You've spent some time behind the triggers of a plasma-drive galactic fighter. And more than one horde of fungal-faced aliens has bitten the interstellar dust for standing in your way. But now...

Star Soldier Sweepstakes! Over 100 Prizes! Anyone can win!

Here's your chance to hobnob with the enemy. 1st PRIZE: One lucky hero will win an all-expenses-paid trip to Disney/MGM Studios (home of the alien) for himself and his family. 2nd PRIZE: Another savvy fighter will receive a Sony portable stereo/CD player. 3rd PRIZE: One more galactic pilot will win a Casio digitizing sampling keyboard. 4th PRIZE: One hundred electronic warriors will receive sizzling pre-release copies of the next fast-action Taxan game, before they hit the stores.

It's true that in games where the player only ever sees ship-to-ship conflict, the appearance of the enemy-ship denizens is typically left up to the imagination. It's weird to evoke in an ad, though: you haven't seen our game yet, but here's something you won't see in it!

They do nod to their borrowing of the alien character with their sweepstakes, and the runner-up prizes sound pretty cool for 1986. A digitizing sampling keyboard? You can record dog barking noises and play "Jingle Dogs" without your keyboard including a dog sound!

(I like how 103 prizes translates to "Over 100 prizes!")

The keen-eyed will note some discrepancy regarding the dates: it appears that this game was published in Japan, then sat on a shelf for two and a half years before being released in the US.

Is a sweepstakes what you do when your game isn't exciting enough for its release to be newsworthy in and of itself?

The thick-outline art style is familiar -- I wonder if this ad was drawn by the same anonymous designer who cranked out the blobby art for another Taxan release, 8 Eyes?

OK, no deeper insight this time. Sometimes all we achieve is sharing scans of game ads from comic books. Everything else is bonus.

Ion Storm, 1997.

Reclusive post-modern novelist Thomas Pynchon, whose everything-and-the-kitchen-sink writing philosophy has been a guiding light for a text adventure game I've had in design hell for over a decade, has made a reference to Daikatana in his latest novel, a dot-com-bubble-popping account entitled "Bleeding Edge":

nobody was exactly opening their kimono, even now, with hwgaahwgh .com liquidated, the NDA stays in force till the foreseeable end of the Universe or Daikatana finally comes out, whichever happens first.

Duke Nukem Forever would have been the easy joke to make, but Pynchon never offers any easy jokes.

(And this is not the first time septuagenarian Pynchon has made reference to video games in his work: cf. his Tetris passages from 2006's Against the Day:

The ship in the distance was distinguished by an envelope with the onionlike shape---and nearly the dimensions, too---of a dome on an Eastern Orthodox church, against whose brilliant red surface was represented, in black, the Romanoff crest, and above it, in Gold Cyrillic lettering, the legend BOL'SHAIA IGRA, or, "The Great Game." It was readily recognized by all as the flagship of Randolph's mysterious Russian counterpart---and, far too often, nemesis---Captain Igor Padzhitnoff [...] The parallel organization at St. Petersburg, known as the Tovarishchi Slutchainyi, was notorious for promoting wherever in the world they chose a program of mischief, much of its motivation opaque to the boys, Padzhitnoff's own specialty being to arrange for bricks and masonry, always in the four-block fragments which had become his "signature," to fall on and damage targets designated by his superiors. This lethal debris was generally harvested from the load-bearing walls of previous targets of opportunity.)

This gives me the excuse I needed to write up the following ad, a fascinating look at supreme software development hubris before the cocaine wears off.

RULES MUST BE BROKEN.CATEGORIES MUST BE ERASED. EMPERORS
MUST BE OVERTHROWN. THE STA^{TUS QUO} MUST BE SPANKED. ^{AND CONTENTMENT}
MUST BE ROUTINELY TAKEN OUTSIDE AN^{D SMACKED UPSIDE THE HEAD. IT'S A}
DIRTY JOB, ^{BUT SOMEBODY HAS TO} DO IT. AND WE'RE ALL ^{READY TO APPLY} FOR THE POSITION.

WE'RE ION STORM^SM, A BUNCH OF MISFIT, ZEALOT FREAKS WHO TRIED TO REST ON
OUR PAST SUCCESSES BUT JUST DIDN'T ^{FIND IT} COMFORTABLE. ^{THERE WAS A GAP OUT THERE.}
A BIG FAT VOID, ^{AND WE WERE HELL-BENT ON FILLING IT. WE HAD ALL
LIVED ON THE EDGE, BUT WE WERE READY TO JUMP OFF. SO HERE WE ARE. NEW NAME.
NEW IDENTITY. NEW GAMES RATTLING THEIR CAGES, WAITING TO BE LET OUT.}

INTO THE EYE OF THE STORM

JOHN ROMERO: LONG-HAIRED SMART-ASS KNOWN FOR HIS FAST FERRARI AND HIS UNCANNY
ABILITY TO SING THE THEME SONG TO THE SPIDER-MAN CARTOON REALLY, REALLY WELL.
OH YEAH, THERE WAS ALSO THAT DOOM AND QUAKE THING.
DAIKATANA WILL BREAK YOUR ASS DOWN.

BOB "POPULAR" WRIGHT: A TOKEN GREY-HAIR
GIVEN THE TITLE CHIEF OPERATING
OFFICER TO MAKE HIM FEEL IMPORTANT.
KNOWN ^{AROUND THE} OFFICE AS
"^THE FINISHER" AND AS "THE
GUY WHO GETS THINGS DONE." BIG IN THE
MARKET. HUGE IN EUROPE.

ION STORM

TOM HALL: A FUNNY GUY WHO WANTS TO GET ALL TOUCHY-FEELY WITH HIS GAMES. HAS SOME SILLY
IDEA THAT COMPUTER GAMES HAVE TO BE STUFFED FULL OF PERSONALITY, INTERESTING CHARACTERS
AND INTERACTIVITY. IN A PAST LIFE, HE CO-CREATED WOLFENSTEIN 3D, DOOM AND RISE OF THE TRIAD, AND WAS ONE OF THE ORIGINAL FOUNDERS OF SOME SMALL COMPANY CALLED ID.
IN THE FUTURE, ALL GAMES WILL BE ANACHRONOX.

JERRY O'FLAHERTY: HIGHLY TALENTED PAINT MONKEY WHO GETS INTO
EVERYTHING: ART, FILMMAKING, 3-D MODELING AND ANIMATION.
NOT TO MENTION A
BUNCH OF STUFF HE KEEPS
UNDER HIS BED AND WON'T
SHOW ANYBODY.
HIS JOB DESCRIPTION NOW
SAYS HE'S IN
CHARGE OF ALL ART. SO IF ANY OF YOU OUT THERE
ARE DOING ANYTHING EVEN SLIGHTLY
ARTISTIC, IT NOW NEEDS TO BE SUBMITTED TO
JERRY FOR HIS APPROVAL.

"WHO WANTS TO REVOLUTIONIZE THE GAMING INDUSTRY IF NOBODY'S WATCHING?"
CAT ^{DADDY / LIZARD KING /} CEO MIKE WILSON: MANIACAL BASTARD WHO MADE IT
POSSIBLE FOR ALL AMERICANS
TO BUY QUAKE AND A
SLURPEE IN THE SAME
PLACE. RUMORED TO BE A
PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE
FOR THE YEAR 2000
BUT NOT LIKELY TO LIVE
MORE THAN ANOTHER YEAR; HE BELIEVES THAT ALL THE
BEST PEOPLE DIE
WHEN THEY'RE 27.

DOMINION DOPPELGANGER
TODD PORTER: A MANDOLIN-PLAYING, NATTY, GQ TYPE WHO
THINKS GAMES SHOULD BE AS STYLISH AS HE IS. GOES
AROUND SAYING THINGS LIKE "IN THE GAMING INDUSTRY,
THERE IS NO TOMORROW." THEN TURNS AROUND AND DESIGNS
THAT WAY. DANGEROUS WITH A HAMMERED
DULCIMER WHEN HE'S BEEN OUT DRINKING.

EIDOS
INTERACTIVE

DESIGN IS LAW

There's nothing else to say, really: it speaks for itself as boldly and emptily as any aggressive 14-year-old boy might. Attempts to unpack any of the strange and irrelevant claims made would only be good time thrown after bad. All I can say is that it's nice to see that the typography layout artist from the Sega CD "Make My Video" series was still finding work. It's harder than you think to make text that challenging to read!

The best part of this ad scan (and really, it rarely turns out well when companies buy ads to promote their company brand above any of their specific products) is that it finally provides some slim shred of context to inform a baffling-in-retrospect early Penny Arcade comic strip whose origins stumped even the strip's creators when they compiled and published the early years as a book:

Sega Master System, 1987.

In the comments to my last post I was bemoaning how and to whom I would crow about my thrift store find of a Sega Master System until I realised that I had an excuse sitting in the scan vault gathering dust.

In elementary school, due to our walks home overlapping, I found myself hidden friends with The Least Popular Kid In School, who, due to no fault of his own, found himself set upon viciously by the pack -- myself included, publicly, to avoid making myself a target. He was raised by a well-intentioned single mother, a member of the police force, and had a loving pit bull, an Apple 2 and a Sega Master System. The first point resulted in his being a little poorer than the median, an unpardonable sin in a pen of rich brats (one of whom once charitably advised me between classes that I could be cool if I only had a pair of Air Jordans, the crystal moment that made me a Marxist in Grade 4) whose parents hadn't quite divorced yet, and everything that followed resulted from that point: he had the slightly cheaper, now outmoded home computer and the slightly cheaper, tragically wrong video game console. Still, despite the irrevocable cosmic wrongness, we somehow still managed to enjoy playing Chivalry on the former and Shinobi on the latter.

Anyhow, our paths diverged -- my mother forbade me from visiting upon learning that he also had the plum wrong breed of dog at his house, and after I switched to a French Immersion school in Grade 6 I didn't see him again for many years... and I never saw a Sega Master System again in the flesh. Until the other day! The anti-bullying PSA ends here.

While I was at work my long-suffering partner texted me: There is a Sega Base Unit at the thrift store, do you want it? That could mean a lot of things, and all the likely returns already pointed to happy acquisitions gathering dust in my basement: Genesis, Sega CD, Game Gear, Saturn, Dreamcast. Of course there are still a few machines missing but given that I've never seen one in the wild, the odds are that she's found yet another Genesis -- which I have learned since the Sega CD acquisition had some whimsical accessories to engage to its base unit. So I kindly thank her and wave her off, then obsess all day over my potential collector misstep. (Once, near bankruptcy, I found a 3DO at a thrift store and couldn't rationalise coming up with the meager funds needed to acquire it. The next day I couldn't live with my mistake and my partner encouraged me to go back, only to find -- someone else had snapped it up! What are the odds there are two of me in one city? Jen was playing a joke on me -- she had bought it, revealing her trick at Christmas. We still don't have any games for it. To be fair, I did once pass up a TI-99/4A in a Value Village basement which, to my astonishment, some assuredly disappointed bargain-hunter had inadvertently acquired by the time I had second thoughts about it and re-investigated.) So the first thing I did when I got home is show Jen a picture of a SMS and ask her if that was what she saw. With the affirmative, I headed out again before I even got my shoes off to beat the clock and become the first adult on my block to own a Sega Master System. For which I also have no games. (Opening a whole other can of worms: what were the Master System's killer apps, its must-haves?) Bizarrely, the whole thing was not only in its original box, but all the components in their original baggies -- apparently unopened! (Casualties of The Most Disappointing Christmas Ever, reconciliation never achieved in 25 years?) The only missing element I could detect was the Hang-On cartridge, but my recollection and understand is that SMS units had a small game included in their BIOS so you could always have something to play. We'll see.

SEGA
Video Games That'll
Blow You Away!

Space Harrier
[Shoo]ting [Gall]ery
Choplifter
Ghostbusters
OutRun

The Sega Master System
SEGA
The Challenge Will Always Be There

RAMBO: First Blood Part Two
World Grand Prix
Great Football
Hang On & Safari Hunt
[Sh]ooting [Ga]llery
Pro Wrestling
[Trans]Bot
My Hero
F-16 Fighter
Great Baseball
Marksman Sho[oting & Trap Shooting]
Action [Fighter]
Ghostbusters
Teddy Boy
Black [Belt]
Great [Golf]
[Fant]asy [Zone]
[Sh]oo[ting Gallery]
[A]cti[on Fighter]
[P]ow[er Strike]
[Shadow D]anc[er]
Hit [?]
Roads
Pow[er Strike]
[C]apt[ain Silver]
Go[lden Axe]
ap [?]

Now SEGA explodes into your own home! With more games than ever. More levels of play. More responsive controls. Plus, SEGA has digital sound, and graphics that are so real, you'll swear you can smell the burning rubber.
Just imagine, -- the ultimate in arcade excitement loose in your living room.
SEGA's gonna blow you away!

What this ad offers is, of course, an unusual rear view of Hitachi Maxell's "Blown Away Guy" usually seen from the side:

"The challenge will always be there." You know what games never had a reputation for being unchallenging? The phrase "Nintendo hard" exists for a reason. This suggests that Sega was competing with Atari, whose formulaic games could be learned and mastered -- but Atari had already lost the industry race by '89, and so Sega was in the running for second-last.

Sega's iconography was simple but consistent: the grid figured prominently, all over the ad, all over box art, and all over the box for the unit! Buying a SMS is a mistake a well-intentioned parent could easily make, as Sega was of course a renowned name in a video arcade context, with breakthrough immersive hits like Afterburner and Outrun, which one presumes is depicted (and whose implied smell is referenced) in this ad.

It may have more games than ever, but third-party development remained on the scanty side, as a consequence of which this ad repeats some of the same game names. (Will a system ever feature fewer games than ever? Maybe after Nintendo quashed Tengen. The App Store could use such curation: Now we've cut the crap! Only one fart button!)

I've filled in SMS game names based on letters seen on the boxes, but as mentioned there are some repeats, some projections of future releases perhaps not envisioned in '89, and also some character combinations not conforming to any known title released for the platform -- perhaps the artist had a list of working titles?

Copyright Tonka corporation? As no major retailer wanted to deal with video game companies in the wake of the industry crash of '83, much as Nintendo used Worlds of Wonder (of "Lazer Tag" and "Teddy Ruxpin" fame, staffed with former Atarians) to get in the back door of American department stores, Sega buddied up with Tonka, to underwhelming results. By the time they got their American marketing and sales back under their own control, the SMS was in competition with Sega's own Genesis, which would be a much stronger competitor.

Related (to the blog's theme, if not to this particular post): a website looking at the evocative box artwork of Atari 2600 games, which had to hold the players' hands to the imaginary middle ground between what the box promised and what the screen delivered.

The Mobygames Problem

You probably have heard me drop the name "Mobygames" more than a few times in these pages, a(n increasingly) pan-platform user-contributed peer-edited video game documentation project that places a higher requirement on good sources than its wiki peers. (Other general-purpose video game databases tend to either be vast catalogues of emptiness with placeholder pages representing every game by name only or worthwhile warehouses of good content directly scraped illegally from MobyGames, evidenced by, for example, the wild dissemination of empty information about a game I made in high school documented on MobyGames which was, for a time, the sole indicator of its onetime existence.) There were better platform-specific resources maintained by eg. Amiga and Spectrum enthusiasts, but nowhere else that would show you "here how game X looked on platforms A, B and C, and what the differences were between them. Did Genesis really do what Nintendidn't?"

I admired the angle of the site's founders, notably the legendary Trixter (of Hornet archive fame -- hey, actually those are the guys responsible for my '90s multimedia project "the 604 Music Disk" being lost to the ages due to being too ANSI-scene for the demo people and too demoscene for the ANSI people) -- one of those visionary "why not?" programmers who felt it was more important to put a project infrastructure together to document a niche interest (basically, being the IMDB of video games) than to wait until a suitable long-term strategy and business model could be come up with. A similar situation snagged me in '99 at Everything2, which was in place to be Wikipedia before Wikipedia, and then when I left in '03 due to a lack of administrative finesse, I migrated to MobyGames in its place -- and ended up doing a lot less writing about art history, Beat poetry and political science and a lot more about video games... which was fine, since the scholarship had already been done on those other topics, while here was an emerging field in which I felt I could make a much-needed mark.

Ultimately these projects that spring fully-formed from the head of a single visionary grow bottlenecked, however -- they lose interest or lose focus after having kids or, basically, need to justify the financial and time expense of the project. Typically a new crew or an allegedly angelic patron company will come up with what is needed to continue operations and then decide that they'll like its flavour after they pee into it a little bit.

I'm sure Mobygames was no cakewalk for monthly bandwidth charges, as a primary repository for box art scans and screenshots. If it could be boiled down to text-only essentials, maybe it could have remained in its donor-and-advertising-supported form. Instead, the founders handed over responsibility for the site to a terse military type with game industry connections and poor PR skills, who in turn negotiated some kind of deal with game rental service GameFly. What interest GF had in helping to maintain a database full of information primarily about games they'd never be renting out to anyone was an open question, but to demonstrate their nominal interest in their acquisition, they've just imposed a site redesign that has the site's entire community up in arms -- not solely due to aesthetic concerns and the conditions of its imposition, but also because it has broken and hidden a great deal of the database's functionality. Some users have gone on strike deliberately, while others are merely on an effective strike because the day to day business of contributing material and getting it improved has been so obstructed by the new design (and specifically, by elements of the design which were predicted to be problematic months and months ago by the beta-testing approvers, and which were nonetheless rammed through uncorrected regardless.)

I hate to see the site in crisis like this, as it's one of a paltry few oases I've found of good old dial-up BBS forum civility. A truly international cadre of passionate contributors of all ages and both sexes manage to agree to disagree on one of the most holy war-riest of topics, game preferences, in a way free from the rape threats and generally lacking axe-grinding standards of discourse prevalent on forums these days. A breath of fresh air, as was everything2, as were the TABNet online forums, as were well-moderated Usenet newsgroups (I hear good things about Reddit, but my chance direct experiences there are somewhat deflating; also, reports of their community standards include some byways I can't in good conscience support by association with my good name 8)

As a fun game I used to play on Mobygames, I would concoct MG logos using distinct iconography from classic game in-game logos, and the expert specialists being who they are, would more often than not come up with correct answers in short order.

If memory serves correct: Might and Magic 6, Mighty Bomb Jack, Bionic Commando, Oxyd, Great Giana Sisters, Deathtrack, SimCity, Keef the Thief, and Star Control 1, with a bonus serving of Civ 1's world-creation in the background.

Admittedly it's been a while since I played that game there, but I can't imagine doing it here -- first off, I only have one regular commentator, and second, "Shilling Epilepsy to..." is just too long a name to play this game with.

In a roundabout way, I began this blog to have a place to store the primary materials for my MobyGames ad blurb submissions. (And tying it in to the nostalgia full circle, my initial MobyGames involvement was motivated by curiosity over why the industry stopped producing software like the beloved games of my childhood, if I'd missed any similar ones in their genre, and what else their creators had gone on to do. Am I going to end up being nostalgic about the place I used to visit in order to be nostalgic?) All my commentary was kind of secondary to the transcriptions and primary sources. I've since been ramping up research for some poorly-documented corner of gaming history -- specifically, MUDs and computer-moderated PBM games -- thinking that it would end up there at some point. If things don't get sorted out over there, who knows, maybe it will end up here instead.

EDIT: I was somewhat rambling in getting around to the topic here while trying to dovetail it with this blog's theme. I am much punchier on the topic over here.

EDIT, December '13: A solution to the problem is well underway!

"Kid Dracula", NES, 1993.

It's been a bumpy ride! I acquired a pre-owned copy of the text adventure reader, Twisty Little Passages, under tremendously dire circumstances; I went on a trip to Victoria, where I introduced my 14-month-old to Ms. Pac-Man on the ferry and went on my customary shopping spree at Island Collateral.

I know, this is Donkey Kong Jr. It was the return voyage 8)

Then I returned, and picked up a single solitary Game Boy game at a garage sale (wondering whether I can even play it, a Japanese game, on eg. my Super Game Boy adaptor -- turns out I now have 2 working SNES machines, but only one good set of cords, so I can enjoy GB games on the big screen -- now I just need some GB games!) ... later that day my partner kindly picked up an Atari Flashback on my behalf as well as a positively decrepit Mac Powerbook that, as best as I can tell, is only good for making the Mac startup sound. But by that point I'd already looked up ads for my GB game (so as to better indicate to this gaijin just which game I'd actually just acquired) and was moved to post it here. The ad artwork is borrowed wholesale from the awesome Retro Gaming Australia site, whose author actually appears to have personal experience with nearly all the games posted (even when joking about how long they took to get released in Australia, if ever), and provides great context regarding the games' production and reception. Me, I just poke fun at the pictures and choices of words.

Meet a Dude You Can
Really Hang Out With.

Meet Kid Dracula, the coolest living corpse ever to stake his claim on Game Boy. He's got 7 powers, 2 fangs and 1 serious attitude. And he'll need it all to rip through the hundreds of creeps who stalk his 8 level, 5 subgame kingdom. It's enough to drive you batty!

[screenshot]
Transform into a bat and overcome varicose villains like Frankenpunk.
[screenshot]
There's no escaping Kid Drac's Wing 'N Homing Missiles.
[screenshot]
Use the Bitin' Bullet to keep the living dead from getting a big head.
[screenshot]
The Umbrella Lagosi will protect you from the exploding volcano.
[screenshot]
This amazing power will make your worst enemies look up to you.
[screenshot]
These bat dudes will drain the life out of the nastiest nemesis. Cool!

OK, yes, this is a game about Dracula (yes, the same Konami Drac who is the antagonist of the Castlevania series!), who is tied by tradition to bats, which sleep upside-down. This is the crux of our ad's promotional angle -- bats: they sleep upside-down.

"Stake his claim" seems a bit gratuitous of an excuse to invoke the anti-vampiric word "stake". Then, a gang of numbers to confound and overwhelm the consumer. (2 fangs? No need to assert that -- it's standard. And this is the '90s, so the serious attitude is also implied.)

Varicose var·i·cose adjective \ˈva-rə-ˌkōs\: Latin varicosus full of dilated veins from varic-, varix dilated vein. First Known Use: circa 1730. Either Frankenpunk is a lot more disgusting than I thought, or this word is being used incorrectly. Umbrella Lagosi is making someone dead roll over in their grave, not least because the surname reference has been garbled to a phonetic equivalent. (Do volcanoes even have power over vampires?) Bat dudes... I... I just have to wonder if this game was a stupid in the original Japanese or if it was fortified with extra moronity for the North American audience.

Of course, this is all just a premonition of October, now soon approaching, wherein just like last year I'll be making blog posts about scary games, boogety boogety. Also relevant to the earlier, irrelevant preamble: for local readers, my next retro consoles party will be in mid-October, you'll be hearing more about it here.