We’re reaching 25 years since Sony first introduced the PlayStation 2, but current PS5 owners have nothing to be excited about in 2024. We’re just a short way away from the expected launch of PlayStation 5 PrFr. While this is probably the company’s biggest hardware release in four years, you wouldn’t know it from the boring affair that it was Game state showcase of the game over the past month.
After watching Nintendo mop the floor with Microsoft and Sony with theirs the latest direct game showcase, I’m left staring at my old Nintendo Switch sitting at home on top of my ancient PlayStation 2. Because as dry, humorless, and corporate as Sony is today, I’m reminded again of how much that same company was once willing to offer to market your gaming gear. There was a time a quarter of a century ago, between 1997 and 2001, when Sony wanted its PlayStation to be the crudest, ugliest console you could buy.
It was a better era when we could all sit back and laugh at a company’s attempts to sell to our worst instincts, itself a real-life satire that somehow doubles as anti-satire. Sony isn’t making much money right now, and by looking back at some of these old ads, we might be able to see why.
How freaky were the old PlayStation commercials?
This came to mind last week when I spotted an obscene, if entirely fake, PlayStation ad. Sometimes a fake PlayStation ad appears at the top of feeds. It is an image of a young woman with her tongue sticking out, four pills sprinkled across her taste buds. Each pill is embedded with the triangle, X, circle, and square buttons that are indicative of PlayStation controls. It’s not real. It’s so close to the actual print and TV ads lit by the same brand that it hardly matters that it’s fake.
Every time it comes up, people have to remind each other that it’s just some made-up image washed up on a wave from the ever-maintaining channels of the internet. Would Sony honestly promote a message that says, “Games are drugs, and drugs are cool?” Yes, it definitely would, especially when you consider ads where the PlayStation’s face buttons were shown in blood etched into the sclera of a man or attached to people’s nipples.
Remember how out of left field The 1984 Apple ad was? It was directed by acclaimed director Ridley Scott, a man who returned to commercials to help PlayStation promote the PS2 and, perhaps, that gaming was a form of disenchanted counterculture, even when each disc cost $40 to $60.
But somehow Scott couldn’t get over how weird the infamous 1999 “Psychic Wealth” ad was, featuring a young Scottish woman with pigtails and eyes that looked inhuman. The ad, directed by Chris Cunningham, has appeared so much confusion that some viewers genuinely thought that the actress in the ad, Fiona MacLaine, really had eyes set far apart at the far ends of her face.
Even after Sony left its grunge era behind, the company was still known for bad taste. Sony has already apologized for the promotion blatantly racist ad for the PSP, which was released in the Netherlands in 2006. Unwarranted advertising is what may have helped lend credence to the unauthorized ads that include blood transfusion for the Nazis and a man with his thumb in place of his genitals. Sony should have taken the time and energy to denounce these two ads as foreign, unauthorized promotions.
In the PS3 era, we were greeted with less sexualized ads. Yet they still had a raw edge that felt like they still defaced the message, but kept the players’ attention – which I guess is their whole point. The the infamous Baby Doll ad from 2006 said almost nothing about the console. It didn’t specifically make anyone want to go out and buy one. But heck, even as a teenager, every time I looked at a baby doll (more often than most, I guess) I saw a PS3.
We might have been better with self-satirical ads
The most recent PlayStation State of Play was the same, a corporate stream-a-thon where would-be players must watch dozens of trailers for games they’ll never play in the hopes of catching a glimpse of a game that never shows up. Last month’s Summer Games Fest and Xbox Showcase were similarly dry, lackluster affairs explosive spontaneity of past E3s. REST IN PEACE.
That doesn’t mean we’re worse off because Sony’s marketing has moved on from its rebel phase. Ads are inherently abusive. They are psychologically manipulative and misleading, and a great distraction from the daily disaster that is the very existence of billion dollar corporations.
What I loved about Sony’s old marketing is how ineffective it was; it was a reminder of the great excess of marketing in the first place. PlayStation ads of the past are most similar to the satirical ads in games like Grand Theft Auto V and Cyberpunk 2077.
I’m making a new Cyberpunk game. Now that the game is fully stable, I can really appreciate how much time and attention was given to the human elements of our core cast of characters compared to the horrible, inhuman, sex-obsessed world they inhabit. Everywhere you go, you’re bombarded with over-the-top ads for fake beef, cocaine analogs, thermal paste toothbrushes, sex shops, and other Times Square-sized billboards for things you’d certainly never want to buy.
In this way, the ads are cathartic. They were so funny that we were given the opportunity to laugh or scoff at them. But in the same breath, the ads were effective. After all, we’re still talking about them. Sony remains one of the biggest game console manufacturers for a reason. Sony didn’t need to sell you a console in those ads. It didn’t even sell you some “counter-cultural” identity. He sold you for allowing his ads to occupy your attention.
But I still believe they were better than what we have now. Gamers had a shared sense of community, even if they let us laugh at a corporation’s attempts to fake a counterculture. Back then, games felt like newcomers, a new medium for sharing art. Today, most big budget games feel the same way, polished so that there are no more rough edges. It makes it easier for them shut down game studios, laid off thousands of developersand cancel pending projects.
