The 32x had some interesting ads:

French ad for the 32x:

I wonder how much of that came from being a time when the 'parental advisory' type content was starting to become more common, but people's content was also still pretty compartmentalized.

Shows for kids where on at certain times on certain days, and these weird paper things called magazines where something you had to buy or subscribe to to view.

Now, barring some kind of active efforts, people see what they want when they want all on the same Internet so advertisers kind of have to pull back to avoid getting attacked for putting the wrong messages out.

And 80s. The first 8 bit computers and consoles had lots of suggestive ads. They knew their market.

Which was a completely arbitrary unforced error from a marketing perspective, setting back acceptance of video gaming as a ubiquitous thing everyone does by decades, pigeonholing them into a thing that only maladjusted angry young men do. You have the asinine marketing choices of the 90s to partially thank for the toxic exclusionary culture that still exists in many games today. They could have had every kid, girl or boy, cool or nerd, playing video games in 1995 but patriarchy said no.

Ironically, it was counter-counter-counter culture, reacting to the vestiges of Reaganite pearl-clutching that still wafted through life and politics of the time. Same influence that inspired "badly behaved" cartoons like The Simpsons and South Park. Video game advertising just leaned into that last counter too hard and landed in misogyny.

Nah, this ad clearly says that girls can play Nintendo DS too! See look at the picture, it says good girls AND bad girls and both of them are holding a Nintendo DS!

That hasn’t been true in a while. In fact I would go as far as say as the main demographic for video game ads today is middle-aged moms who played Candy Crush.

Pretty much since the Wii casual gamers have been the bigger market.

Lol, there were seriously no rules.

As an Italian, it's even funnier cause "sega" means handjob

Seriously though, the SP was a life changing device for me.

I still have mine in it's protective case that I play at least once a year. I'm nearly 40.

Ss.. Step-gamer?

No way! Is that real?

Oh man, I remember these stick-on tattoos were such a thing here in the early 2000's! Now I'm starting to miss those. Now I'm starting to wonder how many people actually got real tattoos of these back then?

That 80s Bill Gates laying with the computers still gets me.

/s

Video game ads were wild around the 90s and 00s.

The DS in particular was when Nintendo was trying to shake its "kiddie" image, but it's handheld ads have been risqué at times since the original GB

Ebaumsworld

Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time

I don't think this is true. You can disprove this by comparing the fertility rates to the popularity of gaming in different countries, for example in Sweden birth rates rose considerably between 2000 and 2010 despite gaming being an extremely popular pastime in Sweden.

There are lots of factors involved of course but the largest ones are things like widespread access to birth control, being able to afford to raise a child and feeling like you live in a stable, safe environment to raise a child.

Most times it's not.

Well, a couple of points about my post that seems to have generated far more discussion than I would have guessed.

1. I was being a little tongue in cheek, as anyone with any scientific understanding at all knows that “correlation is not causation”. And with a topic such as this, it would be almost impossible to isolate the direct causes for a) young people having sex and b) for dropping fertility rates.

2. Sweden is only one country. Certainly not one that I was focused on (at all). Generally speaking, fertility rates are dropping amongst western (and Japan) countries. Of course there could be outliers. I don’t think that an increase of .1% is statistically significant considering the rates in some countries are about 1/2 what they were 50 years ago.

3. the main point of my comment was that young people are having less sex today. That was an actual study. I’ll link it if in a find it again. In Japan, it’s gotten so acute that 50% of people in their 20’s are self reporting as virgins and 20% in their 30’s. That’s insane to me as a couple decades ago, Japanese people were considered by the west to be promiscuous. However, they were also considered the gaming epicentre at that time. So perhaps the effects take a decade or so to be noticed? 😉

Or perhaps there’s no correlation at all.