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Most effective video game television commercial?

FloatOn

Member
For me it doesn't get much better than the legendary super mario 3 commerical.

super+mario+bros+commercial.PNG


I feel like video game advertising on tv is kind of a lost art.
 
The Switch commercials are pretty on point imo especially the Zelda and Mario Kart ones.

Just wanted to mention a modern one:P
But yeah the oldskool commercials beat all of them imo.
 
I remember seeing the ad for GoldenEye and instantly became obsessed with getting it, had to wait 5 months but it was well worth it.
 
Insofar as the thread says "Effective," then I think one of the best is the Sega Does What Nintendon't campaign. It painted the narrative for a generation of young players that the Genesis is "faster" than the SNES, that Sega was an edgier game company, and that Sonic was a cooler, hipper character than Mario. As an 8 year old, I was completely sold on the Genesis over the SNES, even though my prior console was an NES and I had never heard of Sega prior to that.

Coupled with their North American campaign to flood stores and undercut Nintendo on price, it was an excellent television campaign.
 
The commercial for the original Mortal Kombat where all the people were running in the streets to gather, that got me fired up for the game to come out on console since i played it in the arcade so much. You would have to put your quarter up to call next match, ahh the good ole days.
 
Did Witcher 3's Killing Monsters trailer get air time? I seem to remember seeing it on tv but I cant remember if it was an actual commercial or just a trailer shown on a show or something... If it was a commercial, that one was amazing and helped me convince a ton of friends to get into the series.
 
Probably some of the early Crash Bandicoot videos of Crash visiting Nintendo HQ were good at selling what the PlayStation was all about at the time
 
It's final fantasy 7. Commercial got a lot of people interested and they didn't know what final fantasy was. There were a lot of trade-ins from people in my HS at the time.
 
The Mario 3 ad, for sure

Second place definitely goes to Halo 3, commercials that got me to line up for the midnight launch of a game I did not initially care about. (with a little bit of hype from GAF).
 
Halo has had such great ads. I came to mention the halo reach live action ad, but the halo 3 and Odst commercials are really good too.
 
Going back a ways here, but...


George Plimpton Intellevision Sports


Back when Atari was the sales king, a direct comparison like this was the right approach particularly using something real to illustrate the difference in graphics.

Instead of a character game or space shooter, they use the approach of, "everyone knows what baseball is supposed to look like, which one of these looks closest?" and it's very effective.
 
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