From movie-style marketing to business as usual: The use of cinema(tic) in games promotion 1990-1999

This paper uses ProQuest’s Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive (EIMA) to explore the use of the term ‘cinematic’ in games promotion in the decade 1990–1999. It offers a clear platform for linguistically aligned archival studies and charts the use of terminology as it emerged and changed within the period of study. Adding nuance to claims that the 1990s saw promotional convergence between games and film, this paper uses a language-oriented archival methodology to highlight how the notions of industrial convergence may be seen as incremental developments rather than sudden shifts in promotional discourse. In exploring how game promotion used terms associated with and emerging from the cinema, the paper maps the ways in which games promotion solicited and distinguished itself from a competing industry, drawing attention to the complexities of mediatised convergence and public versus industrial discourse. In highlighting and extrapolating key moments within the corpus, this paper identifies several areas of future study and serves as a call for further study into games promotion.