It strikes me that I have no point of reference because I haven’t seen any ads for 20 years. If they stopped doing y2k edgy-style ads, what are they like now?
Its easily available, but I suppose by ‘in the wild’ you mean picking it up in a secondhand store, rather than online marketplaces. If not, have a look at buyee to pick up a bargain.
Interestingly they command a higher price than I expected on eBay.
I picked up FFIX and installed the Moguri mod. I thought people were overhyping it, but it really is like playing the game for the first time again. 10/10 would recommend.
That Spider-Man box for Gameboy Advance gave me serious nostalgia. I never owned the game but I think because I saw it dozens of times behind the glass at Walmart growing up. I haven’t seen it in years. Back when they had the controllers out so you could stare up and give yourself wild neck pains from playing games while mom shopped.
I cannot describe the emotions of excitement I felt for this game to be released. Waiting for the midnight release for this game is still one of my favorite memories haha. And once we got the game, the hours and hours of fun with friends… really was something looking back on it.
I know some don’t like it because of some choices they creative team made that weren’t exact to the lore of the games, but I’ve been enjoying the Halo TV series. Had some moments that reminded me of the campaign and game series highlights. I’d say it’s worth a watch if you’re a fan - don’t be put off by the initial backlash.
I just wanted to have actual, official ones shared!
This one is not official, it was done by a girl who goes by https://www.instagram.com/p/CQZUoIJrW26/?hl=en&img_index=1, she just tried her best to make a photo in the ‘style’ of the old Y2K era, and the days of PS2 ads and…everyone ended up believing it was real. She did such an amazing job of it, this one often gets shared as if it were done for Sony.
And…to be fair, the actual official ones got way worse than those I included:
Heh this post blew my mind twice in one package: I was definitely one of those that believed it was a real ad. I distinctly remember some discussions about the serialized nature of it or not. So as you said, super well done.
But secondly, the official ad you posted instead has three nipples at once? And one male two female on top? That almost seems weirder to me.
Reminds me of this post on Bluesky. These ads were wild at the time, too; even some that predate this era. There was Fear Effect, which was basically marketed entirely on the back of the game featuring lesbians when that was taboo. There was Rayman standing at the urinals with a guy in 9-5 business attire presumably staring at Rayman’s dick. The Neo Geo “You need a pair of these” steel balls “to play one of these” ad. Plus the shockingly racist European white PSP ad; that was a billboard, not a magazine ad, but it had “video game magazine ad energy”, in this case with “(negative)” at the end of it.
We need to go back. Everything now is too sterile. Publishers do not take any risks on games anymore. We don’t get games like Illbleed or Burnout from AAA funding anymore. Games that look at a genre and really ask what actually belongs in that genre.
Nowadays its all unoptimized Unreal Engine copy-paste Over the Shoulder perspective slop.
Indie is being more experimental these days simply because of how easy it is to develop video games now, but still lacks the necessary funding to create experiences on par with what AAA can offer.
To be fair, an indie dev just tossing stuff together on the weekends and evenings has everything needed in these accessible game engines to build a AAA title of 15+ years ago.
I would argue that is not true. I don’t see many Indie games that match AAA games from 2010 in polish or content, honestly. Maybe there are a few, but I cannot think of any off the too of my head. Most are like AAA of 25+ years ago.
On a technical level it may be achievable that an Indie game matches a 2010 AAA game, but I think mechanically speaking that has not happened yet. Indie games have a hard time even matching the content and polish of 20 year old games from 2005. Where is the Indie Resident Evil 4, or Elder Scrolls III Morrowind? Some Indie games try to compete, but they either aren’t polished enough, look like they released in 1999, or are too short in content to compare to those games.
That Tainted Grail game that just came out this year is supposedly the indie Elder Scrolls. Maybe you’d argue that’s AA, but that’s still a symptom of how our standards have shifted. Games like Resident Evil are also abundant these days; not so much like Resident Evil 4 in particular, but RE4 was an experiment that split the difference between old Resident Evil and modern third person shooters.
I only bring up RE4 since it released in 2005. Morrowind is even older at 2002. My point was more that there aren’t any indie games that match the content or polish of those games, as old as they are.
Its mostly a limit of indie in general. Not enough money or time to match AAA games of even 20 years ago. AA absolutely should be at minimum matching 20 year old games, but even the funding AA gets should be enough for AAA games from 2010.
That’s what I was trying to say is they have everything they need mechanics-wise built into these game development environments. The difference between AAA and indie is more on the scope of how much artwork, sound design, writing, voice acting, Foley work, etc. goes into the game
A solo independent developer can pretty easily recreate the mechanics of GTA V in Unreal for example, but they can’t realistically recreate a selectively compressed representation of the entire LA and San Bernardino counties plus a 14 hour (or however long it is) single player campaign
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