On DarkZero podcast #64, we talk a bit about game adverts. My favourites are the old Sega adverts from the early 90′s, and I thought I’d do a quick blog post where I gather some of them up.

The basic premise was that there was this good-looking guy in his late-20′s/early 30′s who lived in an articulated truck with a teenage ninja boy. The guy is apparently training the young lad to be an amazing ninja/gamer, and the training regime involves playing lots of Mega Drive games. All the adverts took place at night, with the guy just hanging out in the back of his truck, playing games in his rotating armchair and casually explaining to viewers how Sega games have made him totally awesome. To begin with, here is the advert that persuaded me – aged 6 – that Sonic the Hedgehog was the coolest game ever made:

Look at him go! Bouncing around in the Spring Yard Zone like a pinball! And the little ninja kid flipping around and bouncing off stuff… it really gave me the impression that I too could learn to flip around and bounce off things like Sonic, if only I had a Mega Drive. Watching it again as an adult, I’m more drawn to background details like the bike hanging up in the back of the truck. The whole interior is decked out in chrome and neon, walled by large banks of mysterious electronic devices and containing a fruit machine, a single large bed (?!), the famous rotating chair, and various pieces of furniture that appear to have been stolen from a funfair.

Who is this man? Why is he hanging out with this ninja kid? The only thing we can sensibly draw out of these ads is that the kid keeps sneaking up on him either as part of his ninja training, or because he wants to play on the Mega Drive, or both. Some light is shed on their relationship by the following advert for Golden Axe:

The music is the real kicker – so laid-back, it come across more like ad for Werther’s Originals than a hack and slash scrolling beat-em-up. Also, it turns out they live with a dog?! We see the guy brandishing an apple while passing another to his young cohort – between that and the bike on his wall, he seems pretty health-conscious! You may also have noticed the brief glimpse of a surf board, in the shot where the kid spins around in the waltzer seat. All in all – putting aside the fact that he’s a loner who plays games all the time and whose only friend is a small child – he’s presented as a character totally outside of normal gamer stereotypes.

I also find it interesting that his words don’t seem to match his actions. “How do you progress to level 8?” he asks. “You eat fast food…” while he eats an apple, “…you humiliate every machine in the arcade…” while he sits at home playing on a console, “…and you practice for real!” as he trips up the ninja kid. Is this supposed to be so ironic? My mind is blown. And on that note:

My favourite of these adverts is the CYBER RAZOR CUT. The guy walks into a barber’s shop and buys a suite of upgrades to his cyborg body, catapulting the internal universe of the adverts into a Gibsonesque cyberpunk future. I remember being slightly disgusted by the ‘body horror’ aspects of the procedure as a child, but also thinking it was totally awesome. These days, I suppose the biggest question on my mind is what kind of society is this guy living in, when a person might walk into a shop and get extensive cybersurgery purely in order to be better at videogames?

I guess after the CYBER RAZOR CUT ad, they decided to spend less time documenting the strange relationship between the guy and his ninja apprentice, and more time showing you clips of games:

Eventually the whole campaign was replaced by the dreadful Sega Pirate TV campaign:

There’s some degree of continuity in that they starred the same actor who played the barber – a man called Steve O’Donnell, better known as The Bloke Who Played Spudgun In Bottom. I hated these ads though, they’re far too fast and noisy and full of ill-conceived ‘subversive’ posturing.

Never mind, hey. Years later, Sega would go on to develop my second favourite ad campaign: SEGATA SANSHIRO!

Dude beats up kids for going outside to play baseball instead of playing on a Saturn.