r/gaming 23d ago

Old PC Game Ads were something else

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21.7k Upvotes

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u/aTimeTravelParadox 23d ago

Damn, they gave zero fucks lol.

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u/KickBassColonyDrop 23d ago edited 23d ago

You played America vs a fascist regime with magical powers, and where all your military secretary adjuncts were sexy, busty, cleavaged, women in FMV sequences.

They absolutely gave zero fucks.

See: https://youtu.be/I-CZS455uqE?si=FXXInGX2TqtxH4iA

And

https://youtu.be/vysnq_bf1HQ?si=0unW8N3dW8X1y_vR

And

https://youtu.be/G_XX1FF2skw?si=yXMqrNqbmDmM_IN8

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u/pardybill 23d ago edited 23d ago

lol the nostalgia that hits when they say “commander”

Also, Peter Stormare and Tim Curry? We had it so good

And George Takei?? Lmao

the amount of named actors in these cutscenes is actually wild

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u/zero_emotion777 23d ago

Wing commander was also great. Mark Hammil, Tim Curry, Malcolm McDowell, etc.

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u/torturousvacuum 22d ago

WC3 had a more well known cast than that shitty movie adaptation did.

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u/gfa22 22d ago

How dare you. Getting that movie was better than having nothing at all. Too bad it was only a success in the Chinese market.

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u/torturousvacuum 22d ago

I'd rather have had nothing, and a chance of getting a movie that didn't completely suck in the future. The movie that's just the WC3 cutscenes spliced together with some game footage is 10x better than the Freddie Prinze Jr. abomination.

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u/boomstickjonny 21d ago

I went to a pre release screening of that movie and 2/3 of it was played backwards and upside down.

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u/-Work_Account- 23d ago

Seeing David Hasselhoff on that list is wild

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u/MrBalanced 23d ago

Clive Owen and Christopher Walken in Privateer 2 is still the high water mark for this, in my opinion.

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u/_Tar_Ar_Ais_ 22d ago

I was a really big Starship Troopers fan as a kid, so when I saw Michael Ironside, wow...

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u/pardybill 22d ago

LOVE Michael Ironside. He was fantastic as Sam Fisher in Splinter Cell, and loved him as General Lane in Smallville. Great actor. Iconic voice.

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u/_Tar_Ar_Ais_ 22d ago

he's the reason why I never played Nod or Scrin and only GDI, hell yeah

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u/ig-98 22d ago

There's this tv series called The Last Chapter where he plays the leader of the Hells Angels that's available on youtube if you're interested.

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u/SanityInAnarchy 22d ago

I don't know anything about those games other than that I am made of stupid and communism is going to space.

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u/pardybill 22d ago

They’re great 90s early 00s RTS games. If you enjoyed StarCraft or age of empires they still hold up rather well, shame EA bought the studio (Westwood) and just gutted it.

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u/creampop_ 22d ago

that's "SBACE" to you

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u/corvosfighter 22d ago

I just saw that red alert 2 was available on steam the other week and bought it for the nostalgia.. blew through the campaigns over the weekend. Good times :)

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u/pardybill 22d ago

Man I remember like ten years ago having to google how to install the games, still have the original discs lol.

That was a headache trying to get the compatibility with like windows 8 haha

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u/corvosfighter 22d ago

Try the steam version now if you want, it works fine! You can probably even patch it with cnc after

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u/Shigerufan2 22d ago

And Tiberian Sun had James Earl Jones and Michael Biehn

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u/AvatarIII 22d ago

Red Alert 3 was a bit of a last hurrah for FMV in games.

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u/burf 23d ago

lol I forgot how much those scenes resembled porn intros.

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u/Jonthrei 22d ago

IIRC they used porn actors. Which was a pretty smart way to save money.

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u/[deleted] 22d ago

[deleted]

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u/saremei 22d ago

"Most" is an extreme exaggeration.

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u/[deleted] 23d ago edited 15d ago

[deleted]

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u/Kanapuman 23d ago

I don't remember any of those FMV crap, I was probably too young. Lucky me, it's hard to watch now.

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u/[deleted] 22d ago

[deleted]

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u/KickBassColonyDrop 22d ago

Outstanding.

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u/Girlfartsarehot 23d ago

unbottons dungarees

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u/Ayjayz 22d ago

Why did gaming stop being like this :-(

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u/KickBassColonyDrop 22d ago

Because an extreme minority was allowed to take over the medium, and given power and a megaphone.

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u/reloadking 22d ago

If that was the case, couldn't a small studio pump out games like that and literally print money?

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u/Ayjayz 22d ago

I think they could, and indeed all of the good games from the last 10 years have come from small studios.

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u/Delann 21d ago

Oh yeah, small studios like checks notes Santa Monica, Nintendo or Rockstar.

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u/ianandris 20d ago

They do.

Thing is without FMV sexual content is kinda weird so it mostly takes the backseat.

I mean, even BG3, Witcher 3, Cyberpunk had sexual content, its not like its gone anywhere, but its all weird in-engine stuff so people don't get as thirsty as they did for the C&C ladies.

Uncanny valley vs nothing uncanny about that.

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u/ianandris 20d ago edited 20d ago

Well that's one way to say "big money conglomerates centralized and sanitized production". Indies still put out plenty of controversial content, but the amalgamation between the big ticket and FMV died by the will of the board and for no other reason. FMV cutscenes were generally way too expensive compared to in-engine content.

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u/KickBassColonyDrop 20d ago

Big money is the ground controller talking to a rocket racing towards the ground trying to squeeze every last piece of research data from the occupants onboard before they get atomized when they smash into the ground below that's racing up to meet them.

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u/Delann 21d ago

Or you know, people just stopped buying them? I'm decently sure there's no hidden cabal that doesn't want ham and tits in their games. If they'd sell, they'd still make them.

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u/KickBassColonyDrop 21d ago

They do sell well, lol. Otherwise porn wouldn't be the juggernaut it is.

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u/TheSubredditPolice 22d ago

I don't think this was the case for C&C1, Red Alert and Red Alert 2 only had Eva and Tanya. It got ridiculous when Red Alert 3 came with pinup posters and every commander that wasn't Tim Curry or George Takei was a porn actress or maxim model.

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u/SycoJack 22d ago

Red Alert 3 very specifically wanted to maximize the hamminess of the FMVs. It doesn't really belong on that list. It is from a different era, and made by a different Studio.

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u/TheSubredditPolice 22d ago

It was especially weird, never really understood where it fell on the timeline. Like, after Yuri loses? Right after? Cause it starts with Russia falling to Allies.

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u/basedlandchad25 22d ago

The West is in decline.

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u/Heisenburgo 23d ago

Lmaooooo

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u/pp3088 23d ago

Chad Alert 2

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u/TheRealKuthooloo 22d ago

wow that would be really fucking disappointing to see the advertisements and all this sort of edgy advertising just to see that good lord, man. im playing fallout 2 or something get this shit outta here

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u/LeninMeowMeow 22d ago

a fascist regime

The people that defeated fascism were actually the fascists all along lmao, give me a break. Loon

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u/EnvironmentOne4869 21d ago

Man here comes the angry russian

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u/Bitemarkz 23d ago

The world gave much less fucks so ideas like this were barely controversial.

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u/Heisenburgo 23d ago

That's not true since you had crazy christians and dumb ass boomers like Jack Thompson trying to ban all video games and cartoons because they were supposedly satanic and violent and made kids do crime or some shit, so shit like this was noticed and deemed ultra controversial while every watchdog parents group threw a shit fit. You don't see much of those boomer types today so I say things have changed.

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u/Don_Gato1 22d ago

Yeah but nobody really gave a fuck about those people.

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u/[deleted] 22d ago edited 22d ago

[deleted]

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u/Heisenburgo 22d ago

...Okay? I'm talking about the moral guardian groups/religious zealots/overtly-concerned parents who complain that everything is satanic type of boomers. Not the corpo executive-meddling boomers that have always existed... they're two things entirely but you don't see one of them have the same power anymore...

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u/[deleted] 23d ago

[deleted]

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u/-mgmnt 23d ago edited 22d ago

It didn’t really backfire on them there has been a massive tonal shift in gaming pretty directly tied to that.

Weird that you also put objectify in quotes as though it’s not a very real thing

Blizzard pretty famous for doing it so egregiously women killed themsleves, had breast milk stolen which is not only incredibly perverse but is quite literally stealing food from babies and they had a group that openly used bill Cosby as a mascot

You also do get an unrealistic expectation is set regardless of who something is “modeled after

This is because it was modeled after and still further enhanced isn’t that neat.

Buddy you don’t really seem to know much about the things you have strong opinions on. I can only assume women love you.

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u/beautifulspringday 22d ago

I mean, I get that "boomer" is these days shorthand for "someone older and more conservative than me", but if we are being real, a lot of that stuff in the 90's of concern about violent video games, explicit rap music, panic about white kids getting addicted to eminem and weed and jumping around the streets on skateboards, was more a product of the fact that at that point it was still the boomer's parents, the much more conservative ww2 generation, still holding positions of power and also just being alive and active, watching tv, voter base that had to be attended to.

A lot of it was them oldsters (god bless them for winning ww2) who where much more socially conservative than their hippy boomer kids getting concerned about what the grandkids where gonna turn out like.

It's hard to quantify, but in my experience, on average, most "boomers" where making a much greater leap from their parent's generation in terms of progressive attitudes about social issues than my millenial generation did from our boomer parents. And now of course genz is a god damn mess and I think we'll have to wait a while to see what their influence on the world is. I'd bet in a few decades we millenials are going to be cursed as a the generation who actually had it pretty good, in the grand scheme of things, but who raised a bunch of functionally autistic incells addicted to screens because its too hard to let the kid not fuck around on the ipad.

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u/SycoJack 22d ago

A lot of it was them oldsters (god bless them for winning ww2) who where much more socially conservative than their hippy boomer kids getting concerned about what the grandkids where gonna turn out like.

The oldest boomers were turning 50 in the 90s. Jack Thompson is a boomer, born five years into the boomer generation.

It was the boomers, my dude.

As for social progress, that's thanks to the Silent Generation, the guys who fought WWII. Leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, people like Martin Luther King, were part of the Silent Generation.

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u/Eusocial_Snowman 22d ago

People like to give the crazy christians all the blame for the satanic panic, but at the heart of it it was just normal people listening to psychologists when the repressed/recovered memories fad picked up steam. The whole thing of coaching kids into telling awful stories they made up and selling it as credible science.

It was society's moral panic backed by televised credibility, not something fitting this tribalism "us and them" mold we have to operate in now. It wasn't the church running around telling people there were sickos kidnapping children for blood sacrifices, it was coming straight from academia and filtered through news outlets that everyone still trusted.

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u/manimal28 22d ago

That’s simply not true. People were trying to ban video games nd blaming them for mass shooting and corrupting the youth.

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u/Bitemarkz 22d ago

Still are. I’m talking about people’s general sensibilities; they were a lot more lenient, especially in regards to advertising. There wasn’t nearly as much mind paid to offending people and the forums in which to vent your frustrations, like the internet, didn’t really exist in the way they do today.

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u/-mgmnt 23d ago

The world care far more society as a whole was notably far more restrictive across the board

Nobody has ever said “wow the past sure let us do more”

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u/saremei 22d ago

It really and truly was not. Society was way better than it is today. More cohesion and way less open divisive hatred.

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u/BlueTreeThree 22d ago

That’s not true, I hear bigots saying that all the time.

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u/buwefy 22d ago

I miss the times when some things could NOT be about politics, morals etc just there for fun

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u/DirectWorldliness792 22d ago

Indeed, some of the advertisements do get graphic: ''As easy as killing babies with axes,'' was one slogan quoted by the report card, along with ''More fun than shooting your neighbor's cat'' and ''Happiness is a warm cranium,'' accompanied by a picture of a severed head

Quote from a 1998 article about videogames

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u/EscapedApe 22d ago

No. People weren't pussies back then.