Rad Dudes, Rude ‘Tude, and the Family, Too: How Nintendo and Sega Advertisements Shaped the Image of Gaming in the 1990s

The tale of the console wars of the 1990s, the stodgy, conservative, family-friendly Nintendo consoles waging an advertising war against the rebellious upstarts behind the Sega Genesis, has been told many times over. These histories are “typically a mix between summaries of factual data and interviews of the key actors who were part of the events” (Arsenault, 2017, p. 9). However, there has been relatively little research taking a systematic approach to measuring the veracity of these narratives. This article aims to supplement those histories by examining an archive of 2,875 print video game advertisements spanning from 1989 to 1995. We discovered that both Nintendo and Sega imagine their audience to be gendered male, although Nintendo's ads featured a fairly even split between children, adolescents, and adults while Sega's ads leaned more heavily towards teens and adults. Sega had more advertisements of a crude nature, although Nintendo's ads were not entirely free from such content. However, when it came to ads featuring sexualized images of women, Nintendo nearly matched their rival. Finally, Nintendo was far more likely to feature pictures of families playing games together. By studying these ads, we can better understand the ways in which the construction of the “gamer” as a consumer category evolved over time, planting seeds that can still be felt within gaming culture today.