What's Santa's Favorite Video Game?

Schoolyard joke one day, national magazine cover the next:

My recollection is that the handling in Namco/Atari's racing coin-op Pole Position was pretty drifty already, so turning it into a special ice-laden Christmas edition would have been straightforward.  (And if the game were around today, in the age of DLC, it would probably have happened.)

This is a magazine cover circa 1983, from Electronic Fun magazine's second year of operation.  I've found actual Christmas-themed video game advertisements to be unexpectedly rare in these seasonal issues.  Most companies just ran the same ads they did year-round, we just saw more of them printed during the gift-shopping season.  In 1983 the home game market was not as mainstream as it is today, nor was Black Friday quite so prominent, and new releases were not necessarily promoted at retail in the days when a "big" release might sell tens of thousands rather than millions of copies.  So the holidays were not necessarily a big sales period for anyone but the console manufacturers... and, of course, the kids who depended mostly on Santa for new games.  That well-used copy of Combat was just itching to move into a cardboard box under the bed.

Too bad that North Pole Position cabinet doesn't have any room for Santa's bag of toys.  And it's even more unfortunate that Santa's watching the screen instead of his actual flight path, and appears to be headed for the outer limits of the Earth's atmosphere.  Asphyxiation appears imminent; perhaps Santa heard about the X Prize and mistakenly thought it had something to do with Xmas.

C'mon, you know you laughed when you read that, in spite of yourself.

Happy Holidays!

1989 meets 1979 meets 1959

The cover of the May 1989 issue of Video Games & Computer Entertainment magazine asked, IS THE JOYSTICK A THING OF THE PAST?

The question is prompted by Brøderbund's U-Force controller for the 8-bit NES, which was meant to revolutionize the videogame controller with its high-tech cube of infrared motion detection.

It did not, primarily because it didn't actually work very well.

But this VG&CE cover seems behind the times even for its era -- the Atari-style joystick was already becoming a thing of the past, as the greater flexibility afforded by the NES and Sega Master System's D-pad-plus-buttons style began to shift the entire industry's approach to the human-machine interface.  Asking whether the "joystick" is a thing of the past seems seriously out-of-date.

Even more seriously out-of-date: putting a Caucasian dude beating up an African-American dude on the cover of your magazine.

Cover Gallery: VG&CE, Halloween 1990, Featuring Elvira

For Halloween 1990, Video Games & Computer Entertainment magazine put the beauteous Elvira on its cover, inspired by the new UK HorrorSoft label's adventure game Elvira - Mistress of the Dark, distributed in the US by Accolade, and starring the horror hostess with the mostest:

This was the second time Elvira had appeared in an adventure game -- she previously hosted HorrorSoft's first title, Personal Nightmare, but this time around she figured more directly into the plot.

This was also, very possibly, the first and only time Elvira appeared in any context that did not prominently feature Cassandra Peterson's bountiful cleavage.

Cover Gallery: Electronic Games, Halloween 1983

There have always been horror-themed videogames in the mix, even as far back as 1983, when Electronic Games magazine ran this Halloween cover.  Unfortunately, the industry didn't yet have any recognizable horror-themed mascots -- no Silent Hill Pyramid Heads or Castlevania Belmonts -- so the artist had to make do with the usual suspects, cast into a Halloween milieu:

 

See, they're celebrating scary games, and the 3rd birthday of Electronic Games magazine.

Ummmmm... yeah.

So let's see -- at the top we have the mad bomber from Activision's Kaboom!, a generic dragon beautifully painted for an early issue of EG and frequently recycled during the magazine's run, a red cartoon ghost with a Crazy Climber obsession, and a penguin who appears to be unhappily participating in Konami's Pooyan.

At the bottom, we see Donkey Kong, a remarkably muscular Mario, and his original, buxom main squeeze Pauline from the days before he decided that royal chicks were his thing; Q*Bert, apparently playing a tune on his nose; a couple of drug-addled Smurfs; a toothy beer-drinking Pac-Man; and a mustachioed gentleman I take to be Bounty Bob of Miner 2049er fame, based on the presence of his faithful mule. 

Terrifying!