/vr/ - Retro Games

>>7878746
The fad existed already. Nickelodeon, Ren & Stimpy, and Bart Simpson ushered in a subculture of kid power where it was supposedly cool to be gross and crude, ya know stuff your mom would disapprove of. That was picked up by marketing departments trying to sell stuff to kids and so they jumped on the whole Nickelodeon slime angle and taken to its logical end, lead to an ad campaign that made Earthbound look like it was a game about literal garbage.

>>4948273
No.

>>4851537
>ad on the display TV
it boggles the mind as to why NoA made such lackluster ads for what could have been a player's choice game

>>4828727
Sort of off-topic, but it always bugged me that EB never sold well because of its bizarre "lol 90's grossout!" marketing campaign Personally I think that they should have focused on the Lovecraftian horror that is Giygas or the Alien invasion setting, given that old B-movies were popular back then due to Elvira and Monstervision

What were they thinking?

I'll give my two cents. I was born in 1987 and me and my friends were intrigued by the Nintendo Power ad. None of us were into RPG's or really even knew what they were, excluding Zelda type games. I rented it and it just didn't click with me. I didn't get the point of turn based combat and thought it'd be more fun just using the baseball bat like the sword in Zelda.

Eventually Mario RPG came out and RPGs began to click with people a bit more. I remember a lot of people getting heavily into them when Final Fantasy 7 came out. I actually wanted to give Earthbound another chance after that so I bought a used copy at Babbages for $20. It finally clicked and I was thrilled when Ness appeared in Smash Bros.

So yea, if I had to guess a lot of the initial failure had to do with RPG's not being popular with gamers back when it came out. It's probably why they included a player's guide with it. I may have liked it more if I bought it on a whim and had the guide instead of getting stuck at the arcade without one.