Gaming Ads: Dreamcast

This is a special edition of the typical Saturday magazine ad scans post. If you've not visited the blog before, normally I post ads from 1999 and earlier that are sorted by publisher (albums were originally on Flickr but are now on Facebook). Since the Dreamcast released near the end of 1999 I set any I had come across during my years of scanning aside. Being a Sega fan I knew I'd be doing something for the Dreamcast eventually and the 20th anniversary of the U.S. release is the perfect time for that. I only had a few ads ready up until the end of July when I began going through the Official Dreamcast Magazine and any other video game magazines I have from 2000-2002. This turned into a much larger undertaking than I had expected and took almost all of my free time from the past six weeks to complete.

Part of the problem was the Dreamcast magazine is too large for my scanner so I used a photo copier at work. Scanning only took maybe 10 minutes per issue but I realized later I should have been pushing down on the spine much harder though I really couldn't go back and re-scan them. Many of the ads are two pages and the copier caused some bright vertical lines on each side of the spine which led to a lot of time spent editing.

As always, below is only a sampling of the ads with the rest reachable through the link at the bottom. By the way, this is big one as there are more than 240 ads! Surprisingly, there are no hardware ads showing the console. The only non-game ads from Sega are the "9-9-99" ads before the Dreamcast launched. I guess it didn't advertise the actual console or accessories in print, just the games. Also, the ads on Facebook are arranged by publisher first and then game title, and the few third-party hardware and miscellaneous ads are at the end of the album.

Dreamcast albums: Facebook - Google Photos

Gaming Ads: Eidos

Originally founded as Eidos Technologies, the U.K.-based company focused on video compression for computers before becoming involved in video games. It was through the merging of Domark, Simis, and Big Red Software that Eidos Interactive was born in 1996. Shortly after the creation of Eidos Interactive, U.S. Gold was acquired and that acquisition included developer Core Design. The acquisition turned out to be huge as Core Design was working on Tomb Raider at the time; Tomb Raider released on November 14, 1996 and Eidos quickly became a household name after that.

Eidos would publish more than 200 games between 1996 and 2009. Aside from Tomb Raider, it published numerous other well known properties, such as Deus Ex, Hitman, Legacy of Kain, Thief, and Commandos. It also published the PC version of Final Fantasy VII and Traveller's Tales' first LEGO Star Wars Game, and co-published the first game in Rocksteady's Batman Arkham series with Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. In 1998 Eidos acquired Gex creator Crystal Dynamics and in 2003 it had Crystal Dynamics take over development duties of the Tomb Raider series from Core Design.

Despite owning so many popular video game series, it ran into financial difficulties and in 2005 Eidos was taken over by SCi Entertainment. Under SCi the development studio Eidos Montreal (Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided) was founded in 2007. In 2008 SCi changed its corporate name to Eidos and in 2009 it was purchased by Square Enix.

Eidos albums: Facebook - Google Photos