20 Awesome Vintage Video Game Ads

Vintage Game Ads

And when I say vintage, I really mean vintage.  The new gaming generation would most certainly be too young to even know about most of the games that were around in the early 80’s.  Hell I was just sucking my thumb in those years.

But to see some of the campaigns these guys came up with for the likes of Pole Position and Pitfall are pretty outstanding (neither of those are pictured below, sorry).

When you see names like Parker Brothers you know you’re going way way back.

Here are 20 awesome vintage video game ads.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Vintage Game Ads

Mario Brothers!

Vintage Game Ads

Masters of the Universe

Vintage Game Ads

Megamania

Vintage Game Ads

Montezuma’s Revenge

Vintage Game Ads

Ms Pac Man

Vintage Game Ads

Mr. Do’s Castle

Vintage Game Ads

Galaxian

Vintage Game Ads

Frostbite

Vintage Game Ads

G.I. Joe

Vintage Game Ads

Grand Prix

Vintage Game Ads

Star Wars

Vintage Game Ads

Joust

Vintage Game Ads

Jungle Hunt

Vintage Game Ads

 Kangaroo

Vintage Game Ads

Keystone Kapers! – My favorite game

Vintage Game Ads

Kool-Aid

Vintage Game Ads

Wizard of War and Gorf

Vintage Game Ads

Lock ‘N Chase

Vintage Game Ads

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33 Comments

  1. This is a good collection. When I was a kid, an ad that I would look at over and over and over again was the 2 page comic spread promoting Splatterhouse for the Turbo Graphic 16. I absolutely needed the game after staring at that advertisement.

  2. Ah yes. The nostalgia of the days when we had to use our imaginations based on the ads and covers to conjure up scenes of violence.

    Nowadays it seems that most games are so uber-violent it’s kind of a let down when you do the real thing.

    What’s next? The threat of real dismemberment or death for the losing player?

    Let’s just hope they never bring the odour of combat, especially the after battle perfume, into video games.

  3. This is a good collection. When I was a kid, an ad that I would look at over and over and over again was the 2 page comic spread promoting Splatterhouse for the Turbo Graphic 16. I absolutely needed the game after staring at that advertisement..

  4. I remember all of these ads! One of my favorites not pictured here was the extremely cryptic ad for Riddle of the Sphinx. There are very few games in my lifetime I couldn’t beat. That was one of them.

  5. Looking at the Atari game artwork was almost better than playing the game itself, which consisted of simple dots (eg. Centipede, Dig Dug).
    In fact those game adverts relied mostly on artwork that fired up the imagination well into the 90’s.

  6. This pretty much sums it up:

    (Joust ad) Long ago, in the distant future, there’s a place where evil knights joust upon beasts of the air.

    Ha, LONG AGO, in the DISTANT FUTURE…

    Oh, and get this:

    Retrieve the enemy’s egg before it transforms back into it’s former self.

    Umm… how can an egg revert to a former self before it was an egg? What, does it break down into the two sexual reproductive cells that made the egg?

    Damn, the 80’s. Everybody was high then, and these were the people in charge of entertaining us as kids. Frightening thought.

  7. Ms Pacman
    “meet the new home version of MS. PAC-MAN. She looks and plays so much like the arcade, she’s unlike any home video game you’ve ever played before. And she’s only from Atari for use with the ATARI 2600, and the S___ Video Arvade systems.

    You get four gho___. Four f__. Escape tunnels. And lots of floating munchims. Pears to pretzels, apples to oranges. To get the top bananna, worth 5000 points, you have to know ::next page:: your little lady backward and forward. The way the player on the left does. He gets 1000 point for the apple. While the player on the right gets only half as much for the orange. But plenty of indigestion.
    So escort MS. PAC-MAN out of the arcade.
    Because this woman’s place is in the house.”

    Yes, you read the last part correctly. hilarity!

  8. the first blank might be…Sears?

    four gh___ = as we all knew, but i didnt want to jump to conclusions: four GHOSTS.
    i can see it now 😛

    and upon further inspection, i dont know if the next blank after ghosts even starts with a f…im totally lost on that one!

  9. I had collected all the Atari ads and kept them in a folder. I LOVED quizzing myself on the different games. That ad campaign came out when Atari was trying to update its image. They changed the boxes from different colors to a uniform silver, the artwork was less like a montage and represented the elements of the game.

    To answer each question, eat the apple, shoot the diving gold Galaxian, stab the ‘gator with the open mouth, punch the falling apple and ALWAYS shoot the fighter before the flying saucer.

  10. Oh, so *that’s* what the objects in Megamania are supposed to be: tires, dice, etc. o.O I always wondered what they were. (It’s still one of my favorite Atari games!)

    You’ve got to love the violence as advertised in the Texas Chainsaw ad, yikes! scary: http://www.atariage.com/2600/screenshots/s_TexasChainsawMassacre_4.png

    @hard-to-read, it is indeed Sears and ghosts, but the third blank is “four mazes”, so no, it doesn’t start with an ‘f’.

    Here’s another, much sexier, ad for Ms. Pac-Man: http://www.retroist.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/ms-pac-man.jpg

    @marc, which ad were the fighter and flying saucer from?

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