Shit was BuckWild back then. I still read old game magz on archive.org… mostly for the ads.
I've read basically every Bungie Weekly Update there has been, and for sure around the launch of Halo2 the only woman featured in the update was (apologies have forgotten the names) the office secretary/snack getter. And they did a whole post on her trip to costco to buy an SUV load full of snacks for the studio. I don't hold any ill will about this and it obviously wasn't meant to be incredibly sexist. But we're 15 years after _that_, even. And most of these are 25 to 30 years old. Perceptions really have changed for the better.
I also seem to remember OPM sort fetishizing their writer "zoe flower," idk, all this stuff was so long ago and is just me remembering it. I'm sure I've got it half wrong.
Here's a weird one from Nintendo of Europe. An ad in German magazine Total! (November 1998) for 1080 Snowboarding that came with a “XXXL” condom attached as part of the “Feel Everything” campaign
Translation:
"Euphoria: Only one of the feelings you will experience while playing 1080 Snowboarding"
@whatsarobot#11551 for them not to have existed would require a fundamental shift to an alternate reality.
it’s no different than the Tyco REBOUND R/C commercial that proclaimed "“DRIVE IT LIKE HATE IT" and it was the dopest thing ever. I remember jumping it off my roof onto a trampoline and watching it fly into the bush and thinking "“I drove it like hated it."
I had the same thought re what if marketing had a different tone. I‘m not sure how to distinguish b/t how much was top-down imposition of nasty stuff vs how much was responding to (even if exaggerating) the culture/scene. My “era” had an ambient tone of sexual insecurity wrt to videogame media. I remember olivia mun always getting sprayed with a hose or something for some reason on G4. Even the 1up show had its laddish moments. I’m not sure who was asking for this though. I kind of think it was more a marketing-configured but maybe I'm just naive
I was always kind of slightly uneasy with the way nikasaur was put on display in riot‘s early days, but the stuff they’re getting up to now is even weirder. They dont even have to use a real human woman anymore. They can just animate a doll that they will never have to worry will age, ask for a promotion, object to anything, stand up for itself, or quit.
[This person's claim](https://step-nie.medium.com/the-problem-with-seraphine-58dc16c07e79) that the character was based on them is disputed by riot, but it wouldnt be the first time theyve gotten in trouble for doing this kind of thing.
It is somewhat of a chicken-egg problem of this kind of advertising perpetuating a gross culture and then those people grow up and move into the industry and continue to perpetuate it. "use sex to sell things to young males" is like a "no duh" proposition, but the onus has to fall on the companies to stop perpetuating this. At some point videogames started specificly targeting young males, and their adolescent sex drives was an easy button to push. But at the agegroup playing games has matured, and games themselves have matured, they have not grown out of this behavior.
But that trend is no doubt more than a small reason for why videogames continues to have a gender diversity problem (though things are getting better, we still have a long way to go).
EDIT: I forgot about this thing that happened earlier this year about XBOX brazil firing a host because she received too much harassment.
i think about that neo-geo ad in the original posts as an idle timewasting fantasy sometimes, imagining the luxe life of a rich 90's guy with the money for a giant tv and a local NEO・GEO dealer. to be free of feelings of financial insecurity, be confidently living at the end of history, and to have neo turf masters ready to rock.
(in these daydreams i am nicer to the lady in the foreground and invite her to play with me)
