This is probably going to seem wildly low-effort compared to my usual posts here, but I’ve found a bit of a treasure trove of print media gaming ads from magazines and sites. And they’re amazing. I found it so fun to see what companies used to do to promote their games.
Things have clearly changed a lot over time, some of them are insensitive or even outright sexist, but if you just look at it through a lens of being a time capsule, it’s fun.
This one’s going to be very image-heavy. If you’re using Boost on iOS then you might struggle to scroll through this (or maybe not? It’s happened with all my other posts though, so you’ve been warned), if that happens just visit using your browser :)
Game Boy Advance/SP:
The ‘feet’ collection were from an ad company in Stockholm, in 2005. I think it is to mean you’re using hands to play the GBA, and only have feet left to use for real life:
PS2:
Nintendo Game Cube:
And that’s that! Just interesting to see a time when gaming was a little more experimental and edgy.
They had bizarre TV adverts as well. You could never accuse early 2000s Sony of not getting weird with it.
I don’t know if any of it really helped. It rode in on the already wildly successful PS1. It had a DVD player in it back when a DVD player was quite expensive. It had SSX and Tekken Tag at UK launch. It could play all your PS1 games and “upscale” them. The only competition it had at launch was the Dreamcast. It was going to sell anyway.
It also looked so cool and, a rumor had it, could run Linux (it could, but only the fat models and with a hard drive sold separately as part of a kit, and only a specific kind of Linux with Sony’s patches, and slowly as hell, but)
I think that was the PS3. They took it out later though, and had to give a paltry amount of money back to people who were using it.
It’d be nice to see homebrew coding return to consoles. Something like Godot ported to it and installed, kind of like Dreams but less limited.
I first got into programming via Basic on the ZX Spectrum, and I do worry how future generations will get into it now they’ve all gone back to phones instead of PCs.
No, the kit was for PS2, PS3 could run distributions intended for it without modifications, I think (maybe with some firmware changes), but those were by enthusiasts, while the PS2 Linux was provided by Sony.
Maybe the future generations will realize the difference between “can” and “should”, and there’ll arrive a niche for simpler PCs. I hope.