Worst Print Ads

The success of the PlayStation brand cannot be denied, but Sony has certainly had their fair share of bizarre ad campaigns over the years. In different situations, they’ve used purple polygon faces, crying android babies, and racist billboards to promote their products. The gangbang ad they ran in support of the PlayStation 2 was especially perplexing. The ad featured a sweaty woman who was sharing an intimate moment with four fleshy personifications of the PlayStation controller buttons. The look on her face made it clear that she was worried about being caught by her significant other, and this presumably made the scenario even more exciting. The premise of a woman being railed by four hairy dudes might seem provocative on paper, but I wonder if it was the most effective way for Sony to sell their system. The PlayStation 2 is the best-selling game console of all-time, however, so it’s entirely possible that I’m just underestimating the popularity of gangbangs.

The premise of the Donkey Kong Land ad is that the game has “the coolest graphics.” The ad further suggests that the strange African man (who we’ve never seen before) obviously wouldn’t be named Yawiga Kanawi if the game didn’t have good graphics. What more proof do you need? If we accept that the man’s name is, in fact, Yawiga Kanawi, then we must also concede that the game has the coolest graphics. It’s basic science! This kind of ad would never fly today, and many people would insist that it was racist. I’m not a purveyor of outrage culture, but I’m mentioning the ad simply because I think it has a stupid premise. The crux of the ad is that the tribal man has a name that would be considered unusual in many cultures. I’m not sure why we’re supposed to accept his claims about Donkey Kong Land‘s graphics simply because he has a peculiar name, however. A random person’s name has no barring on whether or not a game has good graphics. I guess we’re supposed to look at the ad and think, “That guy’s telling the truth about his name. Therefore, he must also be telling the truth about how good Donkey Kong Land looks!”

His work on games like Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM, and Quake made John Romero an industry icon, so there was a lot of built-in hype when he left id Software to start his own studio. The first game from the newly-formed Ion Storm was meant to be released a mere seven months after the company was founded in 1997, but Daikatana quickly fell behind schedule and didn’t hit store shelves until the spring of 2000. Although the game looked ambitious, much of the coverage it received could be attributed to Romero’s reputation. Unfortunately, the game’s marketers thought his reputation could be used as the primary selling point for the game. In lieu of screenshots and descriptive text, the ad for Daikatana simply proclaimed that “John Romero’s about to make you his bitch.” The ad was apparently a reference to Romero’s tendency to trash talk while playing games, but it came off as unnecessarily caustic and confrontational. Imagine a Nintendo ad that tells us how “Shirgueru Miyamoto is going to beat the shit out of you!” Romero’s rockstar personality wasn’t a big enough selling point for most gamers, and the aggressive ad campaign backfired. Generally speaking, it’s a bad idea to threaten your potential customers with violence.

I’m not sure I understand what’s going on in the Klonoa ad, so I’ll do my best to describe it. The ad features a young couple who are the midst of a hot make-out session. The chick is obviously ready to ramp things up, but the dude is reluctant. Before they take the next step, the guy makes a startling revelation and says, “But Susan, I have Klonoa.” He’s obviously trying to warn her about something. Susan is apparently cool with it, explaining, “Hey Baby, I WANT Klonoa!” I know that this scenario is a giant metaphor, but I don’t know what it’s supposed to be referencing. At first, it seems like “Klonoa” is being used as an allegory for an STD. If this is the case, then the woman’s response makes no sense. Why would she be so eager to catch something like gonorrhea or AIDS? Also, it would be a really strange move for the ad to intentionally compare Klonoa to something that everyone hates. The ad specifically says that “everybody wants Klonoa,” so you have to wonder why the guy would have thought his Klonoa infliction would dissuade Susan from carrying on with the sexcapades. At the end of the day, it’s a weird ad with a confusing message.

The 3DO Interactive Multiplayer was a hard sell. It cost $700 at launch, it had limited third-party support, and the market was fiercely competitive. Its library didn’t hold a candle to the heavyweights of the 16-bit era, and the system couldn’t compete with subsequent 32-and-64 bit consoles that were later released. It was an uphill battle for the 3DO, and they certainly weren’t doing themselves any favors by calling potential customers “blithering idiots.” According to the ad, 9 out of 10 people chose the 3DO over other systems at the 3DO Challenge. This campaign was obviously inspired by the Pepsi Challenge, but it didn’t have the same impact. It’s not clear what methodology was used during the 3DO Challenge (assuming it actually took place), but the ad insists that gamers were asked about “stuff like graphics, sound quality, and bitchin-ness of play.” The ad – which was explicitly aimed at “90s guys” – also took multiple opportunities to insult disco music for some reason. The ad insisted that people who don’t like the 3DO “probably still listen to disco music.” It later suggested that anyone who didn’t take the 3DO Challenge was probably “too busy watching Disco Fever reruns.” Disco music wasn’t relevant to the “90s guys” the ad was aimed at, and the 3DO Company vastly overestimated how much people hated the genre. This has to be the least effective attempt at peer pressure I’ve ever seen. It would be akin to an ad claiming that anyone who doesn’t buy a PlayStation VR likes the Spice Girls.

There’s nothing wrong with using provocative images to sell products, and I have absolutely no objection to the sight of a hot chick lifting up her skirt. That being said, the ad for Davis Cup World Tour blurs the line between sexy and creepy. In tennis, the player who has the advantage is in a position to win the game. In the context of the Davis Cup World Tour ad, “taking advantage” obviously has another connotation. The insinuation that you should take advantage of a woman is a little unsettling. It’s important to take advantage of the opportunities you have in life, but it’s downright sleazy to take advantage of people. It’s especially inappropriate to take advantage of women in a sexual manner. The blatant objectification in the ad is disconcerting, and the pun is the opposite of clever. I like nice asses as much as the next guy, but there’s a time and place for everything. Tengen was trying way too hard to be cheeky.

It’s well-established that people tend to read headlines and ignore the rest of the article. This is true of newspaper stories, magazine stories, and print advertisements. For this reason, it was a really bad idea for Nintendo to tell their potential customers that “this game stinks.” The EarthBound ad was in reference to specific enemies in the game that would obviously smell bad in real life. These enemies did not play an especially large role in the game, however, and it was bizarre for Nintendo to base an entire ad campaign around them. The game is filled living trees, zombie dogs, atomic robots, and pretty much anything else you could imagine. To focus exclusively on “burping, belching, gaseous monsters” and their “nasty smells” doesn’t paint an accurate picture of the game’s whimsical setting. In fairness to Nintendo, American pop culture was saturated with toilet humor in the 1990s. Ren & Stimpy was being broadcast on Nickelodeon, and the gaming community was being introduced to characters like Earthworm Jim and Boogerman. That being said, I don’t think Nintendo helped EarthBound sales by following this trend. There are so many wonderful things you could say about the game, and it boggles my mind that it was advertised as “the first role playing game with B.O.”

To commemorate the tenth year of the PlayStation brand, Sony’s Italian branch decided to run an ad that referenced one of the biggest box office hits of 2004. This doesn’t sound like a bad idea in theory, but the movie in question was The Passion of the Christ. The film covered the final twelve days of Jesus’ life, and the imagery was not especially pleasant. A movie with religious themes and graphic depictions of torture is not something you should make light of, but Sony was obviously trying to drum up controversy. Their ill-conceived “ten years of passion” ad featured a smug asshole wearing a crown of thorns that was twisted into the PlayStation logo. As if the concept wasn’t bad enough on its own, Sony somehow found someone with the most punchable face ever. He’s even worse than that one politician you hate! (You know the one I’m talking about.) His look of arrogance and self-satisfaction is a reflection of Sony as a whole, and it doesn’t leave a favorable impression. Sony quickly pulled the ad after it infuriated religious groups. Sony had the audacity to suggest that “spirit of the message was misunderstood,” but they likely got the response they were looking for. Let’s dispel with the fiction that Sony didn’t know what they were doing. They knew exactly what they were doing!

I know we’ve touched on this already, but advertising executives were obsessed with farts in the 1990s. Virtual League Baseball was one of the few third-party games released for the Virtual Boy. It was destined to fail from the very beginning, and Kemco’s bizarre advertisement certainly didn’t help its chances. For reasons I don’t fully understand, the ad focused on two overweight men with exposed butt cracks. (Remarkably, Kemco felt that this ad was worthy of a two-page spread!) Selling a Virtual Boy game would have been a tall order even with a proper ad campaign behind it, so I can’t imagine that the sight of butt cracks motivated anyone to buy Virtual League Baseball. The promise of “baseball without the chili dog farts” is a pretty weak hook, and it’s a safe bet that most people simply turned the page without bothering to read the rest of the ad. If you were brave enough to continue reading, you would have been treated to a story about the boys of summer “blasting you out of the park with the long, foul floaters they get from stadium food.” The premise of the ad was that Virtual League Baseball let you enjoy baseball without having to be subjected to all the gross, fart-related stuff. If you’re trying to tell your fans that your game isn’t gross, running an intentionally gross ad seems counterproductive.

The gaming industry had a weird facination with eyes for a while. (The ad for F-Zero X featured an eyeball that was in the process of being detached from its retina, while the ad for Resident Evil: Director’s Cut was focused on an eyeball in a jar.) These ads evoked feelings of unease and anxiety, but they weren’t nearly as egregious as the ad for NanoTek Warrior was. This particular ad featured a closeup of an eye that looked like it recently had its eyelids torn off by nail clippers. The premise was that the game was so fast that eyelids would be a liability, but the bloody imagery was too much to stomach. An effective print ad will catch the reader’s attention and encourage them to stick around for the sale’s pitch. A bleeding eye in a magazine will certainly garner attention, but it will also encourage readers to turn the page as quickly as possible. Nobody wants to look at a bleeding eye for longer than they have to. The odds were against them, but Virgin Interactive found a concept that was worse than chili dog farts.