Sunday, January 3, 2010

Texting The SEGA Way!

Back in 1994, Sega made an attempt to get into the PDA and communications business with something called the IR 7000.  I've never seen one of these in real life, but Sega was still in the hardware business at the time, and game to trying its hand at a different variety of personal technology.


The ad below does a pretty good job of showing what the IR 7000 is and a little bit of what it can do.  If it were an Apple product, with a suitable ad campaign, all might have been right with the world.  After all, you could use it in class to communicate with your friends, and keep your addresses and phone numbers and calendars current.  Modern cell phones can do all of this and more, but in 1994 it wasn't a bad feature set. 

But this was mid-90's Sega, and in keeping with the company's carefully-honed image, all advertising had to be as in-your-face as possible.  This presented the copywriters with a bit of a quandary when promoting a product presumably aimed at privacy, security and discretion, but they had to come up with something.

Thus, we are informed that WHISPERING IS FOR GUTLESS WEASELS:




Weasels also being, presumably, disorganized.  Disorganized losers.

1 comment:

  1. My cousin and I actually had these... they were a lot of fun... but the game was annoying, because you could never win, we figured out that the uglier the character you made... the better the chances of winning, so we made some pretty ugly characters.

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