Worst Television Commercials

The target audience for an add-on system will always be smaller than the potential audience for the base console, so Sega had their work ahead of them if they wanted the Sega CD to give them a leg up during the 16-bit wars. They ultimately decided that the best way to convince people to buy their new add-on was to yell at them. In 1993 they ran an ad in which an angry black man screams at an idiot teenager and maligns him for not already owning a Sega CD. As a sales pitch, the guy rolls footage of shitty games for about 10 seconds. Inexplicably, the footage turns the poor teenager into a skeleton. I guess he’d rather die than play any of the games he was shown.

To mark the Australian launch of the NES, Nintendo ran an ad highlighting Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, and Gyromite. They were trying to build a brand, and the ad actually showed footage from each game. The main focus was on the animated Nintendo characters who provoked potential customers with the mantra, “You cannot beat us.” They all spoke with creepy robotic voices and acted as though they shared a hive mind. The concept wasn’t without merit, but the execution was confusing and the voiceovers were horrifying. For some reason, the Nintendo characters were joined by a random dude who looked like he worked in an office cubicle. Where did he come from!?

Mister Mosquito is regarded as one of the weirdest games of its generation. In the game, players assume the role of a mosquito and are tasked with drawing blood from various people without being noticed. Against all odds, the Japanese commercial is even more peculiar than the game itself. The ad features a man and a woman who are apparently on a dinner date. After the woman kills a mosquito on her arm, the man inexplicably puts on a mosquito mask. The woman then extends an exposed leg and invites her date to take a bite. When the guy tries to take her up on the offer, the woman pulls back her leg and slaps him away. Never stick your mosquito mask in crazy.

The Legend of Zelda was a revolutionary game, but advertisers had no idea how to market it. There were a couple of Zelda commercials that were considered for this list, but I’m recognizing the one that was inspired by 1980s German art culture. This particular ad featured an Eraserhead-looking dude in a black Sprockets-esque bodysuit. He appears to be in a cellar of some kind, and he’s obviously having a bad acid trip. When he’s not frantically calling out for Zelda, he’s reciting the names of the Zelda enemies in a creepy voice. These enemy names would have sounded like complete nonsense in 1987, and this ultimately makes his ramblings seem even more peculiar.

Breastfeeding is a natural act with an important evolutionary role, but it has nothing to do with gaming. Nevertheless, the French ad for Resident Evil 4 used breastfeeding as a focal point. The commercial features a naked mother feeding a naked infant for some reason. When the camera eventually shows the woman’s face, it’s revealed that she was actually a zombie the entire time! Effective TV commercials should usually be re-watchable, so it’s pointless to design an ad around a cheap jump scare that’s only effective on the first viewing. A few moments of gameplay are shown at the end of the ad, but the audience probably stopped paying attention by that point.

To promote Monster Rancher Battle Card, Tecmo ran one of the laziest ads I’ve ever seen. It begins with stock footage of an old horror movie and promises to offer something more exciting. Unfortunately, it fails to deliver on this promise. The ad jumps back and forth from anime scenes and gameplay footage, and a few unrelated images are spliced in for no particular reason. Everything is tied together by an unenthusiastic voiceover that sounds like a Japanese man doing a poor Transylvanian accent. The ad looks like it was made in Windows Movie Maker in a matter of minutes, and the “boring” stock footage was the most compelling part about the commercial.

Cybermorph is a 3D shooter that lets players take control of a morphing fighter craft. The game had been in development for years and Atari positioned it as a killer app for the Jaguar. The commercial featured a young teen playing the game in his bedroom. The ad showed off a lot of gameplay footage and made note of the “slick graphics” and “intricate moves.” The announcer was enthusiastic, the kid looked like he was having fun, and the editing made it seem like the game was actually exciting. For no reason at all, the commercial ended with the kid vomiting on the screen. It was completely disgusting, but I couldn’t imagine a more honest representation of the game.

Nintendo’s ads were often too provocative for their own good. The premise of their Game Boy micro commercial involved researchers testing the addictive qualities of Nintendo’s products. To that end, they placed a lab mouse in a maze with a Game Boy micro and a slice of cheese. Predictably, the mouse ignored the cheese altogether and made a beeline for Nintendo’s hot new handheld. The mouse lacked the cognitive capacity to understand video games, so it proceeded to hump the Game Boy micro after reaching its destination. Not surprisingly, the sight of a rodent fornicating with the Game Boy micro didn’t help drum up enthusiasm for Nintendo’s new system.

The ad for Yoshi’s Island focused on a morbidly obese man who wouldn’t stop eating. Much in the same way that Nintendo had crammed everything they could into the game, the aforementioned glutton crammed everything he could into his gaping maw. The entire scene was disgusting, and the dude ate so much that he eventually exploded in grotesque fashion! This was an apparent nod to a famous Monty Python sketch, but it also resembled a scene from Se7en – which hit theaters while the Yoshi’s Island ad was still being shown. Talk about bad timing! In any regard, exploding humans make poor advertising mascots.

Sony stumbled out of the gates with the PS3, and they didn’t do themselves any favors with their advertising campaign. Their initial run of commercials was avant-garde bullshit of the highest magnitude. The ads featured Sony’s newly-minted console in sterile rooms, and they focused on abstract concepts like exploding Rubik’s Cubes. The strangest ad featured a creepy robotic baby that was making erratic facial expressions. The range of emotions was supposed to showcase the “awesome power” of the PS3, but it left most consumers confused. It was somehow more confounding than the run of PS2 commercials that were directed by David Lynch.