5 Stupid Retro Gaming Ads We'd Never See In Modern Times

Making video games is hard, getting people to buy them is.. well, not as hard, but hard to the point that ad people will sometimes engage in some pretty shady stuff in order to get the job done. This isn't about that, rather it's about print ads so unbelievably stupid readers will wonder if they were made by the competition.

1 The ad that made us all hate ads

No video game ad enjoys more infamy than Daikatana's “John Romero's about to make you his bitch” poster. This ad caught a lot of deserved flack back in the late '90s even though many don't know its real story. Most think this came about as the result of developer John Romero getting a god ocmplex after the massive success of his previous game, DOOM, but turns out he was only obeying the Marketing department's coked-up ideas. In truth, though pretty dumb, we're only putting it on this list merely for context because there have been way dumber ads that deserve way more attention.

2 ‘Duke Nukem 3D’ Used Homophobia To Attract Dudebros

The only cause for rejoicing Duke Nukem fans have had in the past decade was the recent news that an older build of Duke Nukem Forever had found its way onto the Internet. Being a Duke Nukem fan must be hard, so we're assuming there's a lot of ancient history that must make it worth it. Let's look at Duke Nukem 3D's promotional material, shall we?

We know this is meant to be just a very straight-to-the-point homophobic joke (because the target demographic wouldn't get it otherwise), but it's so basic that even fans of the series should feel offended. This ad was made for Funcoland, a “family-friendly” store that we assume has been thriving to this very day (it hasn't). Their ad, however, has flourished and given birth to a plethora of memes. We hope this is what they wanted.

3 The Original Super Mario Strikers wanted players to know it really was all about balls

Yes, balls are definitely the most important part of Soccer, but not in the way we assume the marketing team of the original Super Mario Strikers was suggesting here:

Probably not the best ad to run in the US, a country whose cisgender woman's soccer team has won 4 world cups and whose male counterpart has only ever won.. inexplicably larger salaries.

4 The white version of the Sony PSP

We'd like to ask our readers a question. How many times has a different-colored version of a console warranted a whole-ass ad campaign? Well, the only one we can think of right now was the PSP white, and yeah, we know that's a dumb color for a console to have, but the ad campaign does a great job of making it look even worse:

Holy shit, Sony. At least they could have tried to offend everyone equally, like that time when they filled subways with suicide-encouraging billboards. Sony was completely unstoppable when it came to dumb publicity in the '00s, which takes us to…

2 Pretty much all PS2 ads

The PS2 is the best-selling console of all time, and it was relatively early into its run that Sony knew the console just could do no wrong. Actually, scratch that. The PS2 was selling so well that Sony knew they could do as wrong as they wanted, and they'd still destroy the competition, so they seemingly did just that. Most PS2 ads were so bizarre we could posit the theory that Sony was trying to slow down the sales in order to not sell too many consoles or something. Below is a pretty weird ad of a man very classily smelling some flesh-colored underwear shaped after the famed Playstation symbols.

That's really weird, and still far from the worst that this campaign had to offer. For the ladies' side of the equation, Sony had not just flesh-colored PlayStation symbols, but PS symbols made of actual human matter getting very intimate with a woman.

And it somehow gets even weirder.

This isn't even sexual anymore, right? It's gotten to a point where no one even knows what the hell this is about and who it is for. Feeling like staving off human contact forever after seeing these? No problem because Sony has a plan for that too!