Digg shares a four pages GameRadar article, with embedded YouTube videos, on "the evolution of Japanese game commercials. 30 years of daft, brilliant and disturbingly odd television/TV/telly skits. Japan has a well-earned reputation for daft, brilliant and disturbingly odd TV game commercials, but it took a long (sometimes painful) evolution along a course signposted by geeky TV celebs in bad jumpers during the 1980s and PlayStation-sophistication in the 1990s, for that rep to be won and maintained.
Back at the end of the 1970s, Japanese gamecorps started trying to convince their public that games were not something to be afraid of; that they were a perfectly reasonable, legitimate form of entertainment, like shogi or fishing. Once the Famicom Era kicked off, those same softcos dropped their polite, civilised image and began to go berserk all over Japan's telly screens with "CMs" (as the Japanese refer to "adverts" or "commercials") that were powerful enough to rip a viewer's mind open and sew it back together within the space of 15 seconds, discreetly lodging a MUST SHOP! impulse somewhere in the frontal lobe before the skit was over.
The evolution was televised, so join us as we trace its path from 1979 to 2009..."
Back at the end of the 1970s, Japanese gamecorps started trying to convince their public that games were not something to be afraid of; that they were a perfectly reasonable, legitimate form of entertainment, like shogi or fishing. Once the Famicom Era kicked off, those same softcos dropped their polite, civilised image and began to go berserk all over Japan's telly screens with "CMs" (as the Japanese refer to "adverts" or "commercials") that were powerful enough to rip a viewer's mind open and sew it back together within the space of 15 seconds, discreetly lodging a MUST SHOP! impulse somewhere in the frontal lobe before the skit was over.
The evolution was televised, so join us as we trace its path from 1979 to 2009..."
