What’s your favorite video game advertisement of all time?

destructoid.com:

Sometimes when we’re feeling sentimental, my friends and I will pull up compilations of old video game commercials from when we were kids and watch them for hours. Games have been around for over four decades now, and over the course of that time, there have naturally been some pretty awesome gaming advertisements.

From minimal yet effective print ads to truly bizarre commercials to murals on the sides of skyscrapers — game ads can be anything from puzzling to clever to downright inspiring. Mobile ads may have gone off the deep end, but there was a time when companies put a lot of thought and effort into their marketing.

There are plenty of lists out there ranking the best we’ve ever seen, but there are a few advertisements for video games that really stick out in my mind. Advertisements are always a kind of time capsule of the era in which they were created, which makes it really fun and nostalgic to go back and watch them again as adults. Even after skimming the surface of all the classic ads we have from games, I feel like there could be a whole field of study dedicated just to the way companies sell games to us. In some cases, they’ve completely altered the course of how we think of games to this day.

Resident Evil print advertisement, 2002. from gaming

One of the campaigns that always comes to mind is the series of commercials Sony did to promote the PS3 in the mid-2000s. The real kicker there was that I didn’t even see any of them in the wild when I was a kid because I was discouraged from playing games as a young girl in the South, but they’re so good that even seeing them as an adult, they’ve stuck with me. First, there’s the iconic PS3 baby doll commercial, which captures this really creepy existential dread