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Holiday Treat #19: Sega wants you to see the future
🕑 Added 2023-12-18 15:55:00 +0000 UTCThe following is part of our 25-day Holiday Countdown Calendar! Every day from December 1st through the 25th, we're posting a cool game history treat, and $5 and up Patrons get access one day early!
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Back in the retail years of the video game industry, if you had a new product, you didn’t just have to advertise it to consumers. You also had to advertise it to stores! One of our favorite types of artifacts is the rare "trade" ad: an ad that was either handed out at trade shows or printed only in retail trade magazines. These are not only rarely seen by the public, it's rare to find surviving examples! This one comes from an unknown, tabloid-sized trade magazine. I say "unknown" because we actually sourced this on eBay, from a seller who clips ads and sells them individually. We asked the seller which magazine this came from but they, uh, wouldn't tell us, fearing we'd steal business from them. But my best guess based on the tabloid size would be either TWICE - a consumer electronics newsletter - Toy & Hobby World, or perhaps an actual CES show daily.
This is one of the coolest trade ads in our collection: an announcement of the Sega 3D Glasses, an add-on peripheral for the Sega Master System. This ad was placed ahead of the hardware's debut at the Winter 1987 Consumer Electronics Show. Sega’s booth that year also included games like Space Harrier and Quartet.
Ads like this are great artifacts because they help us understand how game companies were selling their products. This isn’t the ad that ran in magazines. This was the ad that got the Sega 3D Glasses on shelves in the first place.
It’s also so aesthetic. The glasses in this ad are different from the final version too, which look a little less cyberpunk.
Comments
Andrew O.
I miss SEGA's creativity. Nowadays it feels like the only real innovation comes from Nintendo and everyone just copies them.
