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Classic Console TV Ads
superpenguin writes "Here is a site with some TV ads for classic computers/games systems like the Atari and Intellivision, as well as games for those systems. Find out whether Atari basketball or Intellivision basketball plays more like real basketball. Some real gems here. These ads are in Real Media format."
I remember seeing an ad for the mario brothers game. It was funny ... but sad. Oh so sad. :)
Aa du är död
Classic for me, born 4/17/79 is quite different than classic for someone else. I find NES and Sega Master system to be the Classics (although atari was first) simply becuase the games made the video game industry what it is today. In my opinion, they were more influential than atari, and far more ground breaking than PS2 or Gamcube. (I consider Xbox a pc with less functionality) So, call me what you will I guess, but in my opinion, classic starts with NES.
and thus completley unviewable to me :)
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
For Commodore Computers - where they compare the Vic 20 to the 2600 and the C64 to the Apple 2, IBM and Radio Shack computers,
Commodore Billboard
A lot of these ads and technologies came about before I was old enough to do anything about them, but I still remember a fair bit.
:P
I lived in England when the first Nintendo hit the market, and I begged and begged my parents to buy me one. They finally did, on my first birthday in the United States, in 1989.
What's interesting about this, though, is that I didn't quite understand the concept of a console game system. I even asked my mother where the coin slot on the Nintendo was, as embarassing as that seems, now. I guess I was quite a confused child.
Check out the commercial for the original Legend of Zelda game on the NES.
I'm not sure which is worse, the lyrics - or that nerdy looking rapping blonde kid.
Seeing those old ads reminds me of how exciting computers used to be. Perhaps it's just because I'm old. Do kids still get a kick out of looking at screenshots of the latest games? I bet they don't care much about stuff like screen resolution and amount of RAM anymore - that stuff isn't so relevant anymore.
The old Legend of Zelda ads were tripped out. Anyone remember those?
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Using Linux? Hate RealPlayer? :) ...
mplayer - http://www.mplayerhq.hu
Get the Realplayer codecs from a RA player, and use mplayer instead.
(aa du är instead)
Wow great stuff, brings back alot of memories like learning to program on my 800xl in Atari BASIC. Anyone remember ATASCI? We used to make ATASCI animations for the welcome screen of our (300bps) BBS =) Oh and the memory of how bad that E.T. game sucked! I can't believe they have a commercial for that one. Atlantis & Demon Attack rocked. OK I feel old now...
It would be great to see some foreign versions of the same products to be able to compare side by side!
Snowy Angelique Maslov - http://www.snowy.org/
The site has some other good stuff as well, like: Bootup screens, Magazine adverts, and emulators on which you can run the ROMs of the classic games. Thanks to Whoeverrunsthatsite.
Should win the politicians over, or severely piss off the voting majority.
"You know you don't act like a scientist, you're more like a game show host." Dana Barret
That Intellivision Poker and BlackJack dealer was one pompous prick-hole. Primitive virtual emotions --- he'd get pissed when he'd lose and his eyebrows would turn like \/. I believe that was one of the first interactive "people" in games that I had ever experienced.
Being born in 1984, I remember none of these ads. I did have an Atari 2600, bought at a thrift shop on my own when I was 12(in 1986) because my parents wouldn't buy a game console.
However, we always had a computer in the top half of the performance curve.
Dear Lord! 20 posts on slashdot and I'm still getting 60K+ downloads from the site.
I wonder if that was Phil Hartman's first acting gig?
I'm getting 90KB/s.
20+ MB of movies on that page, and it's still not slashdotted. He's gonna get one HELL of a bandwidth bill.
I found it! it's a miracle!!!
I found the Real Player 8 download on their site instead of the RealOne Crap
Real Player 8
I love how as you go down the list you see tons and tons of gameplay, then for E.T. it's only a title screen and a second of walking. Considering how much the gameplay focused less on the movie, and more on falling into wells it was probably a very good marketing decision.
That being said, I have to rather embarisingly admit to enjoying that game as a kid. And at least it taught our generation an important lesson about wells! One which I note the children of the nes age didn't pay as much heed to.
Everything will be taken away from you.
As I've said in the subjec, these movies don't appear to work with the Mac OS X RealOne beta.
But then, this is the standard 'quality' of any application from Real...
Yeah, but how many of you used advertising methods in an effort to get that new machine that you wanted?
I cannot remember the name of the song, but Commodore used a classical piano piece in some of their ads that was kinda catchy. In an effort using subliminal messages and Neuro Linguistic Programming Skills (I was in junior high at the time) I taught myself the first thirty seconds of that song FAST and played it often.
Alas, to no avail. I had to go freakin' buy one many years later after they were very obsolete. Sheesh.
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
What's with all these rumors I keep hearing about tennis star Venus Williams being of Negroid extraction? I refuse to entertain such ridiculous notions, and am shocked that Miss Williams has not refuted these slanders herself. I assume she considers doing so beneath her dignity. Such times we live in today.
What I really want are videos of current Japanese videogame commercials. A while ago some big gaming site posted the Chu-Chu Rocket commercial, and since then Edge (UK videogame magazine) has been summarising an ad each month. Now I am hooked!
Does anyone know where I can download some of these? I would particularly like to see the Japanese ad for Tactics Ogre: Knights Of Lodis on GBA.
"Honey, don'tcha know? I'm more than Pac-Man with a booooooow!" -- Ms. Pac Man.
BytesTemplar.com
Despite being one of the best computers of its era, the Amiga had the most abysmal ads, where the ads existed at all. Amiga/ST games ads (mainly found in the UK, where the populace preferred the Amiga to the PC (with good reason - the PCs of the time were hopeless)) were often even worse. However, some of them were so bad, they became funny. Anyone know where there is an archive of Amiga-era ads?
Unix Realplayer
You must not remember the late 80s Atari commercial for the 2600...lets see if I remember how it went:
"Still under 50 bucks, but wait there's more!
There's a lot of cool games from your video store!"
>>SHUDDER
I was kinda disappointed they don't have it.
Note the way that the Pitfall commercials ends with "Pitfall, by David Crane." In a parallel universe, David Perry, John Carmack, and Tim Schaffer are all household names...
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
That really pisses me off. Why do videos have to be saved in Real Media format? What's wrong with MPEG? Perhaps I don't want to install RealPlayer on my system?
I know it might make sense if you're encoding and streaming, but think of your public. I won't let RealPlayer anywhere near my Win32 system (hey, I'm at work... :-P) because it screws up all the file associations...
That really would kick ass.
Nowadays, everyone I talk to wants to talk about framerates. 1280x1024 is a given for screen resolution, and colordepths surpassed the limits of human perception long ago. Of course, the framerates people talk about have surpassed what they can see, too, since they're usually talking 90+ fps on computers whose monitors can only do 70-odd hz at 1280x1024 and they tend to be using their own out-of-the-box visual input and processing hardware, where persistence of vision starts taking care of things around 30fps, making anything faster only useful if something is moving across the screen quickly enough to go in huge jumps at lower framerates.
The last time I was wowed by anything of that sort was when I plugged a Playstation 2 into a 5' wide HDTV and fired up Gran Turismo 3 on a 16x9 screen aspect ratio. From about 8 feet away from the screen, it doesn't look pixellated anymore, whereas a console sending out a standard TV signal looks terrible on a screen that large, let alone the distortion from the wider screen.
Other than that, I am starting to get the feeling that the biggest limit on what games can do nowadays isn't what the hardware they are being run on is capable of, whether it is a console or some gee-whiz computer with some overclocked GeForce card with Peltier cooling. It seems to me that the limiting factor is more how much time the artists on a game's production team can afford to put into the models - going back to games like GT3 and GTA3, it looks like the polygon count on any one screen is oftentimes well below the capability of the hardware.
In today's day and age why dont these places use a standard format like divx or mpeg1 or even a simple ole avi? I have never understood the affinity with such an old and universally hated format such as realmedia (Ok quicktime is despised more... and it's STILL the default output format for Adobe Premiere!) Is it that so many companies and people were suckered into actually buying the RealMedia encoder that they want to actually use it? Granted... there arent's many decent mpeg or other format streaming systems out there...
This reminds me of an episode of Dallas in which one could see the Barnes playing "Yar's Revenge" on an Atari VCS system... wasn't this some kind of advertising ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Friends don't let friends use Colecovision!
80s haircuts... flannel shirts... bad humor... terrible songs (the fun is back oh yessirreee?????, hey at least someone paid their rent singing that)
And has anyone noticed that the Pitfall ad says at the end:"don't penis it"? And the voice changes, like someone edited it?
The FUN is back oh Yes - sir - ree
Its the 2600 from Uh - Tar - ee!
Its the video system with classics galore
From space invaders, to cars that roar...
A real hit stick? that controls the screen
so lawless is not and so thats magic mean?
And one more thing. Its got a special low price...
Under 50 Bucks! 50 Bucks?
Now isn't that nice?!
Mod this up.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!!!
1. Make a game for the Atari 2600
2. ?????
3. Profit!
What's incredible about these ads is that they have that "retro futuristic" theme. Watching them now, you still feel like you are witnessing something from the future. Plus, bonus Phil Hartman.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Well, it makes a change. I am fed up with all these trolls, haven't you got lives? No, of course not, what am I thinking.
Why do you enjoy posting frivilous and irritating messages on a news site? It is not big and it is not clever.
The qualify of the clips is so poor.
It looks like a bunch of multi-color smears. I can respect they're trying to keep down the bandwidth costs, and I'm not criticizing the people who put up the clips, but these are low-low quality captures.
They work fine for me in the MacOS X RealPlayer beta.
I'm sure they care who sees the videos, if not then they wouldn't be offering them at all.
I took the time to explore the site, appariently it's a one-man operation. Which is pretty impressive given the quality of the site. I'd encourge donations to keep him afloat, as he politely asked for on his main page.
So case in point: He cares enough to post them for the public to look at. So he doesn't put them up in Quicktime, .MPG, .ASF, or whatever flavor of encoding *YOU* prefer. At least he did it.
It seems like he was trying to cater to low-bandwidth dial-up users. And this is a good thing to me (i'm on cable) because there are alot of people still on dialup, and i know how it feels when i was on dialup.
It is *logical* for the webmaster. It saves him time to get the commercials in various formats, it saves him bandwidth, while at the same time providing something that many consider interesting.
I'm not trying to rag here, but really it isn't as bad as you make it out to be.
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
I don't get it. /me shakes his head in confusion
Why are they using that sucky Real Media format?
Why not divx or mpeg?
I never considered Slashdot to be some pinnacle of jounalistic integrity, but come on, this is nothing more than a ploy to boost Atari's cartridge sales and edge out up-start Nintendo. That is so not rad, guys.
How much I dispise Real Player and the general quality of realplayer downloads. I looked at one commercial and thought "Gawd, that's awful." I tried another and decided it wasn't worth my time. If you are going to do something, why not doing something that will make you proud? This would be a really cool site if the vids were worth watching. I was a teenager through most of the 80s and these games and ads really would have brought back memories.
Anything you say will be held against you.
Sure brings back memories. I've never seen the ads before but the thrill of borrowing a cartridge and running back home from school to check it out was simply amazing.
The underdogs web site lists a lot of "classic" PC games which bring back similar memories.
Oh I remember how badly I wanted the Coleco Adam system. With it's white casing, it was just so pretty.
:-(, which I guess is ok, because my friends only had C64s
I never got one though
Live web cams
Find out whether Atari basketball or Intellivision basketball plays more like real basketball....
In which version do they go on strike?
Real Media? Yeah, there's a chance in hell that I'll install that on my system. I do wish I could see those commercials though.
How bout the classic Zelda commercial. I can still remember some strange guy in a dark room walking around saying "Zelda? ZELDA?? Tektites, Octorocks, Leevers, Peahats? Zelda!"
For a walk down memory lane...
Satanists get good grades too...suspiciously good grades
"Luther destroyed the Gond. huh huh..." something about that one just amused the hell out of me.
Oh yeah, they were strange... I remember some strange guy in a dark room walking around saying "Zelda? ZELDA?? Tektites, Octorocks, Leevers, Peahats? Zelda!"
For a trip down memory lane...
Satanists get good grades too...suspiciously good grades
...plug me into a Sega.
...it's hard to tell the difference between the games and real life. Amazing!
It is funny to me. So many people comment that they were too young to remember these ads. I was born in 1969 (an old fart I guess) so I remember most of them. The day has come when I am retro (old school).
I learned BASIC on a Trash80. I had an Atari 2600 and later the Atari 800 computer and played Star Raiders thinking it was the bomb and remembering how it stayed in the top ten for Computer games sales forever. I played games that came on tape drives start the load and go to dinner and a movie (sorta like I do when I start a mozilla compile now).
My first PC was a 386SX (for SUX) and I remember when I first got online at my local BBS at 2400 baud thinking it was lightening fast.
I remember working of the Mac SEs in the education labs. So much good GUI sense in such a little package. A fully functional GUI OS on diskspace half of what some PDAs have now.
Jeez, I remember loading linux for the first time and I thought it was enough to have a quick machine with a Unix-like OS. I did not even care about the fancy desktops and GUI eyecandy.
ACK
"http://www.theoldcomputer.com/Libarary's/tv_adver ts_summary.htm"
;-)
Is this spelling of 'library' also from the '70s or '80s?
M.
Where's bill plympton nowadays? Kinda funny seeing him push videogames. I think I saw him in a SNL commercial for some cheese-based trivia game.
I've wanted that song for ages (it's in the C64 radio adds).
I'd stop releasing Real for *nix platforms, especially Linux.
What gives? Spend money for a platform (which won't come back), that platforms users call you Spyware, Lame etc.
Maybe I am too emotional but I don't get the problem, especially with Linux guys over realplayer, I have win32 Realone player (which I will get license just to make those mad) and when I switched OFF the Internet services (oh evil (!), god damn thing looks for an critical update etc) I didn't see it connecting to internet.
Stop Linux production Real, lets watch when a thing like Windows Media 10 ships and needs latest directx framework which isn't covered with Wine.
Wow, that was an amazing piece of Deja Vu. All my life I've had that phrase buried in my head, but could not put my finger on where it came from!
Thanks for dusting the cobwebs out of another part of my brain!
So, does history repeat?
If only my Atari 7800 joysticks hadn't broke.....
Ahhha.... those were the days....
Probably all that Joust I played...
heyday
************* www.phonecow.com www.handerazone.com
yep .... it's my fault. I am the webmaster of the website. It's great to get this amount of feedback after so much work. All help it promoting this private owned site is greatly appreciated.
People are free to email me more retro gaming/computing adverts in whatever format they have.
On the point of realplayer format; it was the only format that the adverts were available in.
Hope you all enjoy them.
Regards
HT
a lot of the old atari and original NES games made free to the public by their owners in the form of ROM files.
Here's the soundtracks to a few old 80s commercials I found on videotape. There are some video game commercials in there, but the most "unique" one by far is the one for Mister T Cereal.
The old Atari/Commie print ads are the best because *everyone* in the picture is high on cocaine.
If you remember, then you know what I'm talking about, anyone else need not reply.
--- Do you believe in the day?
I'm totally with you. But not just about games. It was about computers themselves. They were so powerful that they left science behind and took on an aura of magic. And much of the "common art" of the day (television shows, movies, magazines, books, etc.)used computers as a device to suspend disbelief: maybe a computer could do this...
;)
actually, I'm not going back far enough- from the 50s and 60's computers were the enemy- the mechanization and resultant dehumanization was the constant theme played into the ground. 2001, Colossus the forbin project, etc. etc. "computers are evil becuase they can destroy you" - then there was a switch to the thinking that "well, they're dangerous, but thats becuase they're powerful..." and that is what I am a product of.
So my childhood was filled with the movies "war games", "tron", "wierd science" (oh yeah, my parents tried to instill a sense of "culture", but all that crap went in one ear and out the other)
Now I'm sure this can be related to the first time you had a computer go "on line" not necessarily internet, but through a modem to a local bbs. It was empowerment. There were others out there who had the knowledge and there was plenty for the taking. Everything from computer hacks, to zero-day warez, to Ann-R-Key (say it real fast) files, this was the final step.
And in the background of my mind I knew that all the pieces of the recipe were in place, and the new revolution was just an arms length away. It was the future, and it was dying to be discovered.
yes friends, it was pr0n.
(oh-kay, ignore that last line. But you know what I mean!)
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
thanks, now all i have to do is sign over my soul to real networks and it'll let me download it!
Then you really need to check out Atarian Magazine. It was a short-lived Atari-run magazine that only ran for three issues. Only issue #1 is archived there, but you can see why it didn't last long.
Be sure to check out pages one and two of the "Adventures of Atari" comic. Will Atari defeat the evil forces of Ninja-Endo? Stay tuned, kids!
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
*Shudder*
I remember they came out around Christmas, for about $1000. I spent paper route money and got one hot off the presses.
If anyone remembers, they were incredibly buggy. They were on sale for about $300 a couple of months later, and I spent the next year returning the thing every 30 days.
--
Imagine for a moment a world without hypothetical situations...
Imagine for a moment a world without hypothetical situations...
Before Coleco Vision, before Intellivision, even before the Atari 2600, there was the Coleco's Telstar Arcade. I remember many late nights spent in my jammies with this baby!
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
I remember articles in Electronic Games (anyone else get that magazine? It was great!) discussing the various techniques used to shoot the commercials to avoid seeing the scan line.
There were long discusions about some fellow who developed a method of actually having someone stand in front of a TV and talk about a game being played in the backround. IIRC it was something similar to the 'blue screen' used in movies and newscasts...big stuff in early eighties!
Imagine for a moment a world without hypothetical situations...
I miss my SX-64. I used it all the way until the early 90's, even running VIPTerm in 80 column Eyestrain-O-Vison on that tiny CRT.
:)
It's too bad it's so damn heavy -- the SX-64 is portable in the roughly same way that a cement block is portable. You could probably kill someone by swinging an SX-64 at their head. Also, don't forget your extension cord because the SX-64 never heard of batteries, and the cord that comes with it is about as long as your arm..
But you can play an aracde perfect game of Ms. Pac Man or Donkey Kong on it, check your e-mail, write a paper, surf the web, watch some fantastic demos, and crank up the SID chip music. It's hardc0re.
I think it's time for me to buy another one.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
I believe you're thinking of Kids' Writes. It was an stage performance show where kids would write to the network with their suggestions for skits and even some short scripts.
Those who complain about affect & effect on
They work perfectly fine for me as well.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
check out This ad that has a picture of young BILL GATES in an APPLE AD!!!!. Check out all the other cool Mac ads avail. Here Anyone remember any of these?
Thanks for the link. I've got Realplayer 8 for Linux installed on my Redhat box, and it works just fine -- better, in fact, than my DivX player, which occasionally crashes. So I have to admit, I don't really understand all the w3 h4t3 ReAlMedia!!! posts on Slashdot.
.GIFs, but I don't see the same kind of drooling flames anytime someone directs you to a .GIF using website. Seems to me Real has been pretty generous to the Linux community. Not "Open Source" generous, but at least "we support your choice of operating system" generous, which is where it all begins.
Unlike my Windows version, Real on Linux doesn't give me any lip. When I close the app, it doesn't nag me about upgrading, it just quits. I'm impressed that Real, unlike Quicktime, even offers a Linux port. From my perspective, Real on Linux is better than either Quicktime or Real on Windows.
So why all the animosity?
Is it because Real is proprietary? So are
So why all the nasty venom? What's the problem with Real supporting Linux?
.
Hey I'm glad I made someone's day a tad bit brigter :).
They worked fine in OSX for me.
When I think "old computer" I think about the Atari 400 and that awful, awful Timex Sinclair thing that had membrane keyboards as opposed to keys that would actually move up and down! Of course, considering how many cookie crumbs and burrito bits are lying in the cracks of my keyboard right now, I guess I shouldn't be chuckling quite so hard...
The other thing that sticks out in my mind is daisy-wheel printers. Sure they were more expensive than the dot matrix printers and a hell of a lot slower, but you could actually read your printouts! What a novel idea! Man, I wanted a daisy-wheel printer so bad!
The Timex Sinclair is worthy of a post or two in itself! Not only was that keyboard a joke but the friggin' screeen would blink everytime you pressed a key because the memory couldn't handle the strain of adding another character to the display! One of my friends got one and we laughed at his sorry ass.
GMD
watch this
Just don't click NextNextNextNext blindly on the install. Read exactly what you're doing, and RealPlayer won't take over your computer.
u n). Voila, a docile RealPlayer.
After you've installed it, disable the system tray icon in Preferences, and run msconfig and get rid of the "eventsvc" startup in the Registry (HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\R
Yeah, it sucks that you even have to do this, but at least it's only three steps. Now stop whining and download it.
is a solid Slashdot story. :)
Geeky, retro, sentimental and a somplete waste of my time. Ahhh the geek inside smiles
No Radio Shack ads
p.s: I always did want to see Bill Bixby get mad, turn green (and into Lou Ferigno) and start bashing TRS-80's all over the place :-)
They wouldn't risk making that game nowadays; some kid would pretend to be Pac-Man, swallow a couple of the marbles, and before you know it... instant multimillion-$$$ law-suit for Namco and/or the toymakers. Even if the kid had thrown up the marbles 30 seconds later ($20m for distress, obviously)....
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Can anyone tell me what the little tune was that they used to play in their commercials? I remember it sounded classical, I'd like to know what it was.
Thanks
I just threw out the old Fairchild system a few years ago. It had some good games for its day, I know I spent many hours playing Red Baron on it.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
OK
Where did everybody come from
"It's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
Ah yes, the home computer where the printer is a very necessary periphial, seeing as it contains the power supply for the entire computer!
Another fun fact of the Adam, is it's annoying tendancy to zap any tape left in the drive when powering up the computer. Remember kids, power up the computer, and then insert the operating system tape! :P
That isn't it. At least, I am almost certain there was another similiar one. The lyrics are slightly different, and I didn'T recognize the screen shot (or the rest of the ad, but when I first posted I was just going off the screenshots). IIRC, the one I'm thinking of actually had our sad...sad...rapper on screen.