5 ms·
A board game company defined video game ads for 20 years
- jlebrech 9y agoit makes sense, as pixels were like game pieces and the imagination filled the blanks.
- agumonkey 9y agoNice point, although I believe someone influenced that board game company.
- bluedino 9y agoWhat is that format/style called? I remember reading all the late 70's to early 80's magazines in my our basement as a kid, and all the ads had that look to them. Take for example this Ford ad for a car: http://www.classiccarstodayonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Ford-1975-Granada-ad.jpg http://www.classiccarstodayonline.com/wp-content/uploads/201... The style kind of goes, big headline, then 2-4 fairly detailed paragraphs about the product. You never see that any more. The video games always followed the same template: CAN YOU HANDLE THE ACTION Are you ready for craziest alien battles on the Frobozz Computer System? Then play Foobar 2000, the ultimate adventure! You'll face dastardly demons and high speed challenges, sure to make you ask for more!
- noelwelsh 9y agoI believe it's a style that David Ogilvy popularised. Take a look here, particularly the Rolls Royce ad: http://www.ogilvy.com/our-history/ http://www.ogilvy.com/our-history/
- edkennedy 9y agoLong form copy I believe it was called
- hetspookjee 9y agoI find it quite delightful to look at these advertisements having binged Mad Men for the first time a couple of weeks ago. Cool to see that car news advertisements haven't changed their format in over 60 years. One can almost literally place the ad on a website such as top gear and it'd blend in just fine.
- alanfalcon 9y agoHe could have asked a graphic designer. Those screenshots aren't "as small as possible" - they're as large as possible! You've given this poor designer a 256x240 pixel image and asked him to "make it look good" in a full page print ad. Even at a less than ideal 150ppi, that screenshot is going to be less than two inches wide. Now you have 90% of a full page ad to fill up, so what follows is pretty natural. (I bet there was some Frogger marketing guy who kept insisting, "can't you make the screenshot just a little bit bigger?" And the hand-drawn mock screenshot was the eventual compromise to make him shut up.)
- edkennedy 9y agoI get what you are saying, but this is not an issue in this case. Most screenshots were done with analog film cameras pointing at a CRT. So resolution is not a limiting factor. See: http://www.usgamer.net/articles/back-when-screenshots-really-were-screen-shots http://www.usgamer.net/articles/back-when-screenshots-really...
- alanfalcon 9y agoFascinating! The resolution (meaning literal detail per square inch, in this case) of the artwork is still terrible and you probably don't want to show off individual pixels, but at least you could use a proper print resolution and blow things up to at least 3-4 inches wide on the page if you wanted to. I appreciate how these photos are able to capture the intended phosphorescent blur as opposed to the jagged source pixels that a raw screenshot of today would produce.
- thefalcon 9y agoI had to know more so I looked up how they made those screenshot maps in Nintendo Power: "That machine that we had at Work House in Tokyo looked like a VCR or something. It was huge. They'd hook it up to the game system, and then it would print out a picture that was maybe four postage stamps big. It wasn't even as large as a Polaroid. It would print out this beautiful color picture, and then these guys would sit there and take their X-Acto knives and cut out the trim, and then they'd paste them onto this larger board, and make this huge board that was the entire map." http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/183233/nintendo_power_remembering_.php?page=3 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/183233/nintendo_power_...
- wolco 9y agoThe ad and the imagination created the game. That's why older games feel better than many modern games.
- protomyth 9y agorelated: https://www.polygon.com/2014/3/26/5482198/the-art-of-atari-a-celebration-of-game-packagings-golden-age https://www.polygon.com/2014/3/26/5482198/the-art-of-atari-a... The Atari cartridge artwork which was parodied by Panic https://panic.com/blog/panic-retro-art/ https://panic.com/blog/panic-retro-art/
- brandonmenc 9y agoI collect old PC magazines from the 80s and 90s (ex: PC/Computing.) The business software and hardware ads look very similar. Image search "software computer ad 80s 90s" if you don't believe me. It's just what was popular in advertising graphic design back then - it's not particular to video games.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- lobf 9y agoAny copies of PC Accelerator?
- brandonmenc 9y agoNo, too new of a magazine ;)
- lobf 9y agoHa okay. Do you host your magazines anywhere?
- lobf 9y agoAny copies of PC Accelerator?
- khedoros1 9y agoIt seems like it's still ongoing. TV ads for mobile games, especially, seem to avoid showing actual gameplay for more than a tiny part of the ad. A lot of them stick to fancy CG and actors.