On behalf of Medicins san Frontiers, I must take quill in hand to reprimand whomever is responsible for this advertisement, and the consequent incipient threat to international health:
Having a tapeworm is no laughing matter, I can assure you. I have personally extracted specimens of Taenia as large as eighteen meters from children as young as six months of age. We fight a constant battle to bring clean water and sanitation to the developing nations, and the scourge of parasitic flatworms continues to hinder nutrition and education in many parts of the world.
While electricity and television, and hence these "video games" from which you derive your ill-gotten profit, have not yet arrived in many of the communities we serve, it is immensely irresponsible to encourage the children of any nation to ingest these dangerous annelids or their eggs. The cheerful, bespectacled countenance of the worm depicted in your firm's campaign bears little resemblance to the eyeless, tooth-ringed freaks of nature that populate my omnipresent fever dreams, nightshirt flapping in the moonless Sahara night as I wield my dartgun against the encroaching tapeworm hordes. I awake each night screaming in terror as the seething mass engulfs me, and no woman will have me.
If you will not withdraw your irresponsible advert from global circulation, I strongly suggest at the very least that you adopt this more accurate version, which I have undertaken to repair at considerable expense:
Yours truly,
Dr. Aminan DeJocque
Medicins sans Frontiers
Everywhere
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This is one of my favorite eras of gaming...not for the games, but for the game boxes. The art work was so alluring at the time. It could even mask the crappy screen shots on the back of the box...or at least make you forget them. Spectravision had the best "bad game/great box" ration of them all.
ReplyDeleteAnd the screenshots on the box were rarely taken directly from the game -- they were usually artists' renderings, sometimes faithful and accurate, sometimes not. But the boxes were great -- every brand had its own distinct style, unlike today's game packages that have to align with the console manufacturer's style guide.
ReplyDeleteI JUST came across this print ad a few days ago in an old gaming mag and was intrigued enough to play the game and was thinking about doing a post on it myself. Beaten to the punch again it seems.
ReplyDeleteOne of the main things that prompts me to pull up an old game on emulator is when I come across an unusual ad while perusing an old magazine. I've stumbled onto some gems that way (and some stinkers too).