The Era of SVGA (Sexy Video Game Advertising)
The gloriously horny, wildly misguided age of video game advertising.
We’ve all been there. You’re a sex mad teenager flicking through a gaming magazine, all of a sudden there’s a hot model in bondage gear posed next to some outrageously horny copy writing and you instantly rush out to buy the game the ad is for. No? We’ve not been there? Oh, right, because that never actually happened. Still, the fact that sex only really sells sex didn’t stop the entire video game marketing world from going absolutely buckwild for bit based boobs the moment developers could bolt 3d tits above 3d hips.
Starting in the mid to late 90s (depending on what you consider horny advertising) everyone was under the impression that gamers were all male, mostly young, and very, very lonely. They were wrong. That was just me and the joke’s on them because I had no money. Running with this premise and the mistaken belief that you can sell anything with sex, they embarked on a decade long campaign fuelled by hormones. Fortunately (unfortunately?) for me I was a prime candidate for this targeted advertising. I was a teenage nerd with rampaging hormones and a total inability to communicate with the girls around me. As such I was at the forefront of horny video game ads and you can now benefit from my social awkwardness as we take an incredibly uncomfortable walk through the history of sexy video game advertising.
Sometimes the randy ads made at least some sense and, despite that there are gemstones from dime store jewellers with more facets than her entire body, Lara Croft of Tomb Raider fame became a sex symbol. Yes, the capacity for human arousal is not to be underestimated and her triangular boobs were famous almost instantly, though significantly remastered for advertising. The Tomb Raider campaign would feature copy like “What are you waiting for? See all that Lara has to offer”, “She’s an adventurer with… a rapid-fire body” and “Come on, boys! What are you waiting for?”. We also got Angelina Jolie doing cosplay and whatever the hell this is. The people went nuts.
The tragedy of the Tomb Raider campaigns is that these games were considered excellent on their own and didn’t need sex to bring people in. The original Tomb Raider spawned one of the most famous characters in media and an ongoing franchise that covers every console generation since the original’s release. Though the writers did eventually fall to the “sexual assault creates strong woman” trope. Don’t worry though, it was just a misunderstanding.
Command & Conquer was not to be outdone in the “franchise goes horny stakes” and rolled out a series of ads that had even less to do with their games than the Tomb Raider campaigns. Say hi to Tanya from Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2. While she exists in the game, she’s barely there and it’s reasonable to believe she was included just for this ad.
And it just got wilder for C&C from there as Red Alert 3 rolled out a bevy of military pin-ups. Clearly the Tanya campaign worked because here we have all of the girls from the game. Say hi to the girls.
These obviously Photoshop-free images clearly had a lot to do with a game that consists of tiny little sprites blowing each other up with digital weapons and if you can’t see the connection then I’m afraid there’s simply no help for you. As with Tomb Raider, these ads weren’t necessary.
Of course, not all sexy campaigns were for gems and some games probably did need to get their tits out to bring in an audience. A highlight is Deathtrap Dungeon. Despite being based on an existing IP, the game was middling at best so the advertisers chose to go horny. And not just a little horny, but BDMS horny. So much so that the ad below is considered the paradigm of sex-mad game advertising.
Then, of course, there’s Duke Nukem. Not a sex symbol himself, but an absolute lad and once he’d excelled in Duke Nukem 3D what was there to do other than dive into the strippers and babes bro side of his hilariously shallow character and roll out a deplorably sexist ad or two. Thus we got Planet of the Babes. The campaigns for this digital schlock leaned heavily into the babe side of things and stained an already gross project with a ‘horny teen writes action hero’ vibe. It didn’t help that the game also sucked horrendously, but at least we got an amusing story out of it.
For the most part horny advertising for games disappeared in the early 2000s. Even the internet champion of horny game advertising, Evony, has moved towards the interactive minigame style of advertising. Still trash and still nothing to do with the actual game, but hey, it’s not sexist anymore!
Yet even in these dark frontiers advertising has moved towards interactive mini games rather than tits aplenty. Here’s hoping that advertising continues to evolve and marketers start to think of us less as easily manipulated horndogs and more as thinking, feeling humans. I mean, I don’t think that, but maybe we can convince the marketers.
Liked this? Let me know and I’ll do a follow-up! There’s plenty more horny video game advertising to talk about including the times entire brands jumped the busty, bikini clad shark as both Sony and Sega got uncomfortably weird.
Kris