One of our favourite games consoles celebrates its birthday this week, so we look back at our favourite Nintendo Game Boy ads…
In a world of handheld mobile devices that bring gaming into the palm of your hand, the Nintendo Game Boy probably seems a bit outdated, but when the console first came out it was pretty ground breaking. We were free to play anywhere we wanted, untethered from the wires that were making us sit closer and closer to our television screens as we tried to clear that final level on Mario.
Back then, we could head off to school on the bus with our Italian plumber friend and get a quick game in; we could take it with us on long journeys and we could hide away in our bedroom pretending that we were already asleep when really were getting in the zone on Tetris.
Throughout the years, Nintendo have been pretty clever about how they marketed one of their best inventions, so we decided to take a look back at our favourite ads that should bring about a decent blast of nostalgia for gamers everywhere.
Where do you play with yours?
Slightly lewd and with some fantastic photoshopping, considering it was back in the day, this was a brilliant ad for getting people to play the brand new Game Boy.
The Second Best Thing To Do in the Dark
This was yet another tongue-in-cheek advert from Nintendo for the Game Boy Advance SP which was published in ‘Lads Mags’ around the turn of the millennium and while the ad’s premise might have flown over some of the younger gamers head’s back in the day, it remains one of our favourite Nintendo ads of all time.
Grounded…
Nintendo had a great knack for marketing the Game Boy to both kids and adults and what could children relate to more than getting grounded? We never understood why the kids on television HATED getting grounded, as we saw it as an opportunity to finally finish that last race on Wave Race. Maybe it was all thanks to this poster?
Ooh Ee Ooh Ah Ah…
Ting tang, walla walla bing bang. We must admit that we never really played Dr. Mario all that much, but the song and the shrunken head in the video above were almost enough to convince us the game was AMAZING.
Prison Foot
Not one to shy away from controversy (when it came to their adverts in the ’90s and ’00s, that is), Nintendo’s Game Boy adverts rarely needed much text. The well placed imagery told the entire story and as you’ll see in the ‘Prison Foot’ advert, pictured above, Nintendo didn’t even need to show us the Game Boy console half of the time.
That’s just a sampling of our favourite Nintendo Game Boy adverts but if you have any favourites of your own that we may have missed out on, let us know in the comment section below. But try and be nice about it…
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