Take a trip down memory lane with the following video. The trip begins with some of the first Atari 2600 television advertisements and continues with almost 20 years of video game commercials. This great compilation of ads reminds us of our gaming past with legends like Mickey Mantle selling on demand intellivision, and Phil Hartman playing a wide range of characters for Philips CD-i. There is even a young Tobey Maguire cutting class to play the huge Atari Lynx in the boys room.

Some great early ads demonstrate families playing video games together, while classic GameBoy ads remind adults that your never to old to play games. The video comes to a end with Jaguar & Sega’s crass advertisements during the 90’s that I remember liking at the time, actually were really pretty awful.

We take a look into the past of Sega and where they went wrong in the console wars.

Tecmo Bowl sucks, I got Joe Montana. You’re still playing Mario, Dude! Ask your Mom if you can come over. I’ll let you play on a real video game system. My Genesis has 16-bit graphics, what’s yours again? 8-bit, that’s funny. Oh the good old days of harassing Nintendo players. Being the first kid to own a Sega Genesis on my block was the biggest thrill of my adolescent life. Until Mark “My Parents are so Rich” Bradley brought in his Neo Geo instruction manual, everyone was my friend. But that’s another story for another time. It was a time when wearing British Knights and Air Jordans was as important as having a Triple Fat Goose and a Starter hat to be in the upper echelon of public middle school society. It was the pinnacle of Sega’s Pax Romana. Sadly, like a VH1 “Behind the Music” episode, the downward spiral soon began.

Read the rest of this page »