Blame Nintendo.

Back in the early 1980s fresh off the video game crash of 1983, Nintendo was on the verge of releasing the Famicom in Japan, and needed a way to market the console in America.

There was just one rule. In America, video games were dead. A fad. Disco was dead, and so were video games. So it wasn’t a Famicom. It was a Nintendo Entertainment System.

In stores like Woolworths (think Walmart but not terrible) and Hills (think Target, but also a bit shady) they tried marketing the NES as an Entertainment system. It wasn’t a video game. It was an appliance. Like a VCR. It was the only way to get stores to agree to stock the damn thing. No store wanted the risk of a video game.

Well, after a year of selling, and research Nintendo found kids were the main target of their product.

So they shifted away from the electronics section and into the toy isle. There was just one problem. Toy stores in America were divided. Some isles carried toys for boys, and the other half of the isles carried the toys for girls.

A bit of market research showed that interest in Nintendo shifted slightly more towards boys. 55%‐45%.

What happens next is the key to the PS2 ads.

Nintendo chose to carry the NES in the boys section of the toy isles. Which had an IMMEDIATE influence over not only the marketing in America, but also the direction developers took their games.

There was a clear shift towards the games AND the marketing being geared towards boys 5-13.

Nintendo then DOMINATED the video game landscape. Seriously. If your mom today is roughly 80 years old, theres a pretty good chance she calls all video games “Nintendos” (regardless of brand), the same way she calls all tissues “kleenex”. Or if you’re from the south (especially Georgia) all soft drinks “coke”. Could be orange soda, it’s a coke. Just like it’s one of those Xbox 1080p Nintendos.

Well by the time of the PS2 days, that influence, even though Sony had nothing to do with it, had caked over. Video games were now very male centric, and the age range grew up with them.

In the late 80s, you were 5 years old playing super mario bros. In the mid 90s, you were 13 playing tomb raider and argueing with friends over the validity of a nude cheat code. And by 2001 you were 18 and horny, and…hey, look at these ads for the PS2. They’re edgy!

And that is my TedTalk on why raunchy dreamcast ads, and raunchy PS2 ads goes all the way back to the atari 2600 game crashing the whole industry worldwide 20 years earlier.

That, and puberty.