Gaming Ads: Backfilling #19

As I posted yesterday, I'm doing three days of video game ads posts and today's are all for original PlayStation games from Sony Computer Entertainment America, Capcom, Namco, Square Soft, and LucasArts. Something I should mention is that many of the new ads I've got are from comic books and sometimes the quality is lacking even after some editing. Most or all of the games featured in these ads should be well-known to PlayStation fans. Wild Arms might be the only one not everyone is familiar with, while the others are for Final Fantasy VII, Bushido Blade, Twisted Metal 2, Rage Racer, Resident Evil, and Star Wars: Masters of Teräs Käsi.

Year 5: May Update

Mighty Mouse Board Game (1978)

This month had one big day of posts here, on YouTube, and even Instagram which I finally put a few images on. That was Star Wars Day, of course, but since then I've not really done anything and haven't started any new projects. As has been the norm for the past year, I've been somewhat busy with life as the warmer weather requires more yard work and I do a little gardening, plus I'm sorting through more old board games for donation, sale, or the garbage. Unfortunately, too many of those were ruined by a musty basement and I expect the same when I go through my jigsaw puzzles.

Something I had been working on last month and completed early in May is getting all of the game ads onto Google Photos. I also went back through every gaming ads post since the blog began and updated the album links because many still had expired Flickr links that had to be replaced with Facebook and Google Photos. Along the blog header you'll also now see a "Game Ad Links" tab with all of the individual albums listed with links. I'm wondering if I should list the links ahead of the album names to give it a cleaner look? For example: Facebook - Google Photos: Activision rather than Activision: Facebook - Google Photos so that every line would begin Facebook - Google Photos down the whole page. Either way, that page is a convenient way to find the ads. For some reason Google Photos doesn't allow the sharing of a full page of albums as far as I can tell so I can only link to each album individually. Here is an image of what I get to see when I log in and it would be great if anyone could go there and browse all the albums at once but I can't find a way.

Lucasfilm Games and Dotemu are bringing back the 16-bit Zombies Ate My Neighbors (Genesis, SNES) and its sequel Ghoul Patrol (SNES). Both were originally developed by LucasArts but it wasn't publishing console games at that time so Konami published the first game and JVC Musical Industries published the second. The new versions are said to be enhanced with a quick save option and achievements, plus behind-the-scenes bonus content. Digital copies will be available for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Switch, and PC on June 29th while Limited Run Games will offer some physical editions later. Xbox.com has both games listed as a single entry for $14.99. E3 isn't happening again, at least not in-person, so I'll probably skip predictions. We should still see a fair amount of game news in June.

   

Last month I ended the update about games for kids or families and I'll do the same here. Lately I've been contemplating yet another YouTube channel. If you recall, last year I launched Video Games 2020 which took a huge amount of my time as I recorded footage of as many physical releases as I could which was around 270 games. The goal there was to try and make a buck but I'm still far from 1,000 subscribers. It does get 25x more minutes viewed than the blog's channel though. Anyway, I'd like to get more recordings done for games designed for younger players, like PAW Patrol. I've played some on the blog channel but feel as if I shouldn't bog the channel down with too much modern game coverage and certainly not a lot of bad games as some of those tend to be. There would also be no commentary, just clips like I did for the VG2020 channel. One last thing to mention is I came across a U.K. website called Family Video Game Database that has some useful information, especially for parents that don't know a lot about gaming.

Thanks again for visiting,

Jonathan

LucasArts/Lucasfilm Games: The Adventurer - Spring 1991

As part of Star Wars Day and Lucasfilm's 50th anniversary, I've scanned the complete Spring 1991 issue of The Adventurer from LucasArts/Lucasfilm Games. This was a quarterly newsletter for fans that was printed on newspaper. It's rather big and not easy to scan, and was a bit too wide for the copier I used. While there is some skewed text due to the paper being wavy, all of the articles are legible. I do own the Fall 1991 issue as well and scanned that at the same time but I'll post that one at a later date. This issue has a surprising spelling error seeing how this is from the maker of Star Wars. On page 11 two of the image captions spell Obi-Wan Kenobi as Kenobe!

Gaming Ads: Video System USA and Backfilling #13

Video System was a Japanese developer and publisher founded in the mid-'80s and closed in the early 2000s. I've not found too much detailed information on this company though I did write on Mc O'River previously which was the first name it published games under in North America. It switched to Video System USA in 1997 but it never released very many games in the U.S.

I've only got two ads for Video System so I'm going to do a little backfilling and this will be the last time I combine backfilling with a publisher. Therefore, I'll upload what I currently have which covers Acclaim, LucasArts, Midway, Philips, and SNK. Only four more publishers remain alphabetically for this project that I began about five years ago, though I may need to work backwards to add a few more publishers.

Video System USA albums: Facebook - Google Photos

Gaming Holiday Cards

This post is about greeting cards game companies sent to the press, most are from many years ago. Unfortunately, I only have a few so I wasn't sure if I should share them. In fact, I skipped writing a post about them the last two Decembers before finally deciding to post them this year because even if they aren't too interesting where else would anyone really get to see them, you know, on the off chance someone wants to. Back in the early 2000s my employer received many cards but most were eventually thrown in the trash by my co-workers. I was able to hold onto a few and while we're still in business, nobody sends us physical cards these days. Once in a while a company does send a link to a digital card like this year's from Capcom: Happy Holidays featuring Monster Hunter. Not sure how long that link will be active so I grabbed a screenshot which fails to display that the snowflakes are dropping down the screen. Digital cards are easy to share so I expect this one and others are posted to social media for the public as well.

First up is Sammy Studios which has the most boring card because it is just a regular greeting card. It does look nice and at least some folks signed it but an original card with game-related art would have been more fun. 

The second card is from former publisher Southpeak and defunct developer Renegade Kid. While the other cards are probably all from around 2000-03 (none are actually dated), this one is likely from 2010 based on the game being promoted.

Next up is one from Sony Computer Entertainment America with the PlayStation controller button icons representing snowflakes. It's a very shiny card that looks quite nice in person but not too good when scanned. That very blue image is the scan where the gray parts should actually be white and the blue is silver when it's not reflecting other colors. I'm adding a couple photos to try and give a more accurate look at it. I do like the appearance of this card quite a bit but nobody signed it! What's up with that, Sony? 

Last is a long foldout card with four panels on each side.This one isn't gaming specific as it represents the many divisions of George Lucas' companies back whenever this card was made: Lucasfilm Ltd., Lucasfilm Animation Ltd., Industrial Light & Magic, Skywalker Sound, LucasArts, Lucas Online, and Lucas Licensing. It is signed by six people who I will assume were all public relations representatives at LucasArts. 

Before ending this post I decided to see if any old holiday card links are still active and I found Atlus' 2016 and 2017 digital cards. Both feature a few rotating photos of the Atlus (and Sega in 2017) sales and marketing team. Here are a couple screen grabs of just a single photo from each and, like the Capcom card above, the snow does move if you visit the links.

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