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▲ 110 r/retrogamingmagazines

Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine May 1999

The 20 best-selling PlayStation titles in the United States. WCW nWo Thunder leads for the second month in a row ahead of Frogger and Gran Turismo, for the editors proof that melodrama starring beefy men is good entertainment.

u/memoryloaded — 7 days ago
▲ 8 r/retrogaming

Nintendo Power Volume 85 June 1996 N64 Blowout feature 31 pages on the Nintendo 64 The Nintendo 64 launched in Japan on 23 June 1996 30 years ago North America 29 September 1996 Europe 1 March 1997

u/memoryloaded — 12 days ago
▲ 133 r/retrogamingmagazines+2 crossposts

Redneck Rampage, 1997

A calf with a stick of dynamite in its mouth, lying across a TNT barrel. The slogan: "All the killin', twice the humor… half the intelligence." All of it to sell a shooter where you rescue a pig abducted by aliens. I'd have bought it for the cow alone.

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u/memoryloaded — 21 days ago
▲ 115 r/retrogamingmagazines+3 crossposts

Fresh meat: Quake II, 1997

Quake II was advertised as a meat market in 1997. Levels sold as ground meat. Multiplayer as a family pack at $4.99 a pound. The game labeled UDSA Grade A: Brain-fed Wild Game.

This is a real ad. It survived.

u/memoryloaded — 24 days ago
▲ 3 r/u_memoryloaded+1 crossposts

1UP.com's GameFace profiles

Found the old "all-new 1UP" ad again (the "Get YOUR GameFace on" campaign 2005). Did any of you have a 1UP profile back then?

u/memoryloaded — 27 days ago
▲ 13 r/retrogamingmagazines

That "Win a PlayStation" ad from October 2000 wasn't just a giveaway. It was a primitive data-harvesting machine.

At first glance, this just looks like another standard, slightly sketchy giveaway to win a PlayStation or a Dreamcast back in 2000.

But if you actually read the fine print, it’s wild how much of a data-harvesting machine this thing was.

This ad was run by a third-party marketing company called Elation Inc., not Sony or SEGA. Look at the bottom: to enter, you had to solve a puzzle, hand over your full name and mailing address, AND pay a $3 entry fee per contest.

Basically, they were running a modern digital marketing campaign 25 years ahead of time, using paper:

  1. They were building a massive, highly targeted mailing list of gamers to sell to third parties.

  2. They made the participants pay for the ad space and the prizes themselves through that $3 entry fee.

  3. The puzzle wasn't just for fun—it was a filter to make sure only the most engaged people (the best leads) filled out the form.

Long before tracking cookies and internet trackers, companies were already finding clever ways to gamify data privacy.

Did any of you actually fall for these mail-in puzzle contests back in the day? Did anyone ever win, or were they all just giant data traps?

u/memoryloaded — 28 days ago