The Nostalgia Dirigible: Retro Game Ads

It's a lazy Sunday, and what better way to spend it than by looking at old stuff?  On this voyage of the KGB Nostalgia Dirigible, we're taking a look at some old ads for video games that ran in magazines in the early to mid-1990s.  Put on your Vanilla Ice cassette and grow that rat tail, we're heading off!

 

First up is a classic Konami ad for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time. This was the first TMNT game to appear on the 16-bit consoles, and most people still consider it the best TMNT game ever.  It's a standard beat-em up, just like the old Arcade game, but the improved graphics, varied environments, and time-travel story were a step up for the series, resulting in Turtles in Time being remastered and released on XBLA and PSN last year.

This is a classic, not so much for the game, but for the movie. I love Gremlins, and Gremlins 2 was a non-stop buttload of awesome. I never owned a Game Boy, so I don't have any fond memories of the game, but the Gremlins series always reminds me of being a scared little kid. And I love it for that.

Mortal Kombat was such a phenomenon that even the arcade release got advertisements in major magazines.  I love the terrified look on the kids faces, and the fact that Kano seems to be enjoying it so much.  Basically this ad said that if you were a scrawny kid in Zubazz pants, you were gonna get your ass kicked by full-grown adults. And I think that's a lesson we could all use.

Finally we have two scans from the Electronics Boutique Spring 1993 catalog. Did you even know there was such a thing?  I enjoy these because I always love to look at how much things cost back in the day.  Can you believe the price on SportTalk Baseball? Holy shit.

This is the SNES page from the same catalog. The thing I love here is that they are advertising Hunt for Red October and Harley's Humongous Adventure (?) right alongside with F-Zero and Link to the Past. Two of these things are not like the others.

Christopher Linendoll just bought an N64. He can be reached via Twitter, or found in the hummus section of your local grocery store.