15 HORRIBLE RETRO GAME ADS

"Suck on my frozen urine-stick!"

What's this? Adverts on Digitiser 2000? Why... we're so appalled we could swallow our own uvula. But wait! We've not sold out to the Money Monkey just yet: these are adverts for things what you can't buy no more, guy. 

You see, these are adverts from an earlier era, when it was considered acceptable to sell video games through the medium of awfulness. A more innocent time, a time of sexism, innuendo, and just plain wrongness - and we have chosen 15 sterling examples.

Bring on the Jeremies!

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15. PANIC

Shall we place bets on what the spume is that's exploding out of his nose? It's difficult to imagine a less attractive image with which to attempt to sell a product. Maybe if that foamy stuff was brown? We suspect that the photographer captured the subject just at the point he suffered an embolism. Lacking the funds to re-stage the session, they simply chose to retouch the picture to make the blood white. "Maybe they'll just think it's milk. Or sperm. Or something. Whatever."

14. PAINT N SKETCH LEVEL II

"My Daddy bought me a Tech-Sketch Light Pen with its free Paint-N-Sketch program and instruction book..." is a phrase no child has ever uttered. But then, this is no ordinary child. This is Creepus: Demon Girl. Sure, she looks sweet now, but the second those dark eyes roll back into their sockets, and she starts trembling and speaking in tongues, you'd better run for your life.

13. STD "MEGA-ENHANCING" ACCESSORIES

We don't quite know why this awful handheld gaming accessory was advertised with a boy doing the "full retard" (if you'll excuse the expression) - nor why nobody chose to suggest to the company that it might adopt a better name than "STD". Ironically, judging from the boy in the photo, and that loveless embrace, he's got about as much chance of catching an STD as he has of winning a Least Punchable Face competition.

12. POWER GLOVE

Talking of punchable faces... look at that smirk. Rarely have we seen such smugness. Oh, how we would like to whack him in the mouth with a ping pong bat... but wait. That Power Glove appears to be malfunctioning! Look at that arcing electricity! Perhaps that grin isn't so smug after all. Perhaps his broken NES accessory has induced a stroke. We can but hope.

11. BATTLECRUISER 3000AD

You have to admire the blatantness of this infamous early-90s Battlecruiser 3000AD advert - which was famously banned, before being replaced with a version featuring airbrushed-on knickers. There's really not a great deal to say... but it might've been somewhat less controversial had the stool featured a visible seat. Unfortunately, as it stands the image paints too eye-watering a picture to be anywhere near erotic.

10. CHAMPIONSHIP POOL

This one has it all going on. "Chalk Up, Dude!" it proclaims, accompanying it with a suggestive, yet profoundly unattractive image, which evokes a prostate examination. And then we get the incongruous headline about "The Best Rack In Town!" - which is about as appropriate as scrawling the word "TITS" on a cat's back. There are also two suggestions in the text that this merely "feels" like real billiards, as if they're panicking that we might mistake this for actual billiards.

9. GAME GEAR

Once handheld gaming became a thing, 90s games mags were riddled with adverts linking them to masturbation. The absolute nadir was the series that Sega ran in Viz, which aimed to evoke the style of the comic, while trying to sell us their Game Gear through crude imagery that seems to represent a frantically self-polluting mental patient. They failed in both respects.

8. GAMEKEEPER

We like this one for the second, 'after', image which appears to show the pink-shirted boy screaming in terror at some off-camera horror... Perhaps a severed horse's leg?

7. BIBLE VIDEO GAME

We'd never heard of the thrillingly-named Bible Video Game, but judging from the fun which has been brought home in the image accompanying this advert, we were really missing out. See those bears there, silently judging the Christians... Put a foot wrong, kids, and they're going to tell God...

6. GAME BOY POCKET

Another recurring theme of game ads in the 80s and 90s was to imply that a product was so good that male gamers would actually choose it over doing rudies with a lady. However, Nintendo's Game Boy Pocket campaign took it a step further by apparently aiming the device squarely at the gaming rapist demographic.

5. CRYSTAL CASTLES

"Bentley Bear is Loose!" they tell us. No... "Bentley Bear is Tripping His Tits Off". Crystal Castles? Crystal Meth, more like.

4. SPIDER-MAN

Jack Wheaton apparently spends his whole day "chasing coeds", which wouldn't be so creepy were it not for the fact he appears to be about 36, and appears to be blind and brain-damaged following a terrible accident (an accident which wholly failed to give him super-powers). That girl? She's his carer - and she really wants him to take off his Spider-Man pyjamas so she can wash them. He's made a terrible mess... Oh, Jack Wheaton!

3. GAME BOY POCKET

This is just disgusting. The horrible wall of flesh, with the protruding, circling tongues. The multi-coloured ones we can just about handle, but it's that one on the right - the sickly, pallid, fungal one - that really turns our stomach.

2. NEO GEO

Here we are again. More sexy lady, more sex-ignore - this time he's so engrossed in his game that he doesn't even hear his lady's agonised screams, as she immolates herself in the bath. But what really stands out for us in the image is the way he's playing that game. Who holds any controller like that - least of all, the Neo Geo's massive joystick? Well... if we look closely, it appears to be Christian Bale in American Psycho. That explains everything.

1. VIC-20

Do you know why we find this image so horrifying? No, it's not that man up in the window there, gesturing warmly to his special pull-quote... that's just TJ Hooker-era William Shatner. No - what really stokes our anxiety is the main image, and the fact those boys are doing their "computing" with a cup of juice right next to the keyboard and tape deck. NEVER DO THAT! NEVER HAVE A DRINK RIGHT NEXT TO YOUR COMPUTER, BOYS! DON'T YOU KNOW WHAT COULD HAPPEN? Do you think Shatner will look so kindly upon you  if you damage your Vic-20? No. No he will not. That gesturing palm will swiftly turn into a slap...

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