Preserving Vintage Video Game Print Advertisements

At my local library, I spied a stack of vintage magazines. As I flipped through them, I caught a two-page centerfold ad for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for the Sony PlayStation. Similar ads littered the pages. The magazines, all from the late 1990s, held precious gems between their illustrated explosions and neon heroics: vintage video game ads from my peak memory formation era. Titles like Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill 2, and Tekken 3 illuminated this niche corner of cultural ephemera.

This discovery led me to more. I unearthed a budding community around vintage game advertising. I theorize it will continue to grow as vintage games become more scarce, and as the internet makes a mockery of the past.

Advertising no longer lives as dominant graphical spreads in print publications. It has become disposable, generic slop screaming for attention between short-form videos and sensational feeds. These ads are tangible reminders of the most hopeful, future-facing era of video game culture.

Print Challenges

Print is a challenging medium for video games. Presenting rich digital worlds as exciting proved a substantial challenge for publishers of the 1990s and early 2000s. Even juggernauts like Konami and Squaresoft struggled to balance mass appeal with underground edge. Video game promotional campaigns often fell flat and lifeless on the page.

These troubles, compounded by the bland presentation of still-image 3D graphics printed on paper, made this era and format a unique phenomenon in design and advertising. How do you show enough to entice a new player without activating the cringe impulse? How do you compete with others in the industry while promising something new?

A journey through vintage gaming ads shows how different companies and publishers approached this central tension in different ways. Some went full zany. Many courted pure edge. Others pursued a “less is more” philosophy by never revealing the true rendered imagery of their games.

One such example in a Crash Bandicoot ad campaign from Sony shows a live model in a fur suit on location for several distinct photo shoots. Despite the cutting-edge 32-bit console of the day, the publisher still opted for a visual compromise. Instead of showing detailed 3D PlayStation textures rendered to print, they thought a live model in a silly suit sold their game better.

New Technology, New Approaches

Squaresoft’s Final Fantasy VII was groundbreaking. Originally planned to release on the Nintendo 64, Squaresoft’s graphical ambitions sent them to Sony, where they utilized the new disc format of the PlayStation. Discs offered greater storage capacities, and Final Fantasy VII acted as a harbinger of decline for the cartridge era.

With expanded memory, the game’s playable environments could store more assets, and the nascent cinematic angle of video games could now shine through gorgeous pre-rendered cutscenes. These cutscenes, commonly referred to as Full Motion Videos or FMVs, allowed developers to create lush, filmic scenes far more visually stunning than the blocky reality of pixelated gameplay graphics.

Squaresoft used this advantage in their marketing push, showcasing these high-fidelity pre-rendered scenes rather than revealing the clunky look of the gameplay in its television commercials. This same principle surfaced in print, as the new technology of the PlayStation solved many problems both in memory and marketing. Screenshots of pre-rendered 3D cutscenes made printed ads in magazines and comic books appear far more futuristic than the reality of the gameplay.

The print ads for Final Fantasy VII lean heavily into the technical chest-puffery of the new title, a surprising fact considering the legacy the game now has as a deep, story-driven journey of love, autonomy, and universal human vulnerabilities.

Safe Extraction Methods

Extracting ads without damage is difficult. Some publications make this easier than others. For these methods, I’ll focus on the most challenging scenarios, where both staples and glue bind pages together. Any books/magazines without this combination are often easier for extraction.

Flip through the comic/magazine to find the center staple point. This is often near the middle of the book.

Use a flat box cutter or blade to pry the pointed staple ends from the center binding. Be mindful of the blade’s position on the page, as even minor pressure can create unwanted impressions on the print. You may want to practice your technique on a few test pages before moving on to sensitive materials.

Once you’ve got the staple ends up, flip the book over to the outer spine. Using the edge of the blade, locate the loosest part of the staple’s flat side and begin to pry it upward.

Older books require more pressure. Once loosened, the rest of the staple should slide out with minimal resistance.

With staples removed, you can narrow down your method depending on the layout and the desired outcome. Certain two-page centerfolds fall out in a single piece. Others may require a slight pressure tear to remove them from unwanted pages.

Often using natural pressure is superior to cutting, but both methods yield decent results. Any time you tear or cut a page from a publication, you introduce blemishes of some sort along the edge of the page. Be mindful of this if you desire a complete, intact extraction. If preserving for quality and posterity, avoid removing the pages from the glued section of the book, as this can add additional tear marks and unnecessary perforations.

The Rise of Sanitized Presentation

Vintage gaming ads are fun and offensive. They lack the kind of sanitized presentation common in today’s entertainment marketing sphere. In these vintage ads, there is no whiff of agenda, no sense of committee approval. Minimal red tape. They’re often full of edgy copy that could never run today.

Images are often suggestive and crude while sliding in under the censor’s battalion. In isolation, these factors aren’t worthy of praise. They merely highlight the importance of cultural progression. Many ads show how something that seems acceptable in one era can become a faux pas in a matter of decades.

Expectation Vs. Reality

After delving into this corner of video game culture, I learned that reality differs from expectation. Selling what a game could be often undersold what it was. Sometimes the opposite. Modern video game movie adaptations suffer from a similar problem.

Video game advertisements from the late 1990s and early 2000s emphasize video games as a unique medium. They have no match, no equal, no measuring stick. Trying to fit them into neat boxes stuffed between magazine pages must have been an incredible challenge. I’m just happy to hold onto some scraps of the attempts.