THE CONTROVERSY OF EARLY PLAYSTATION 2 PRINT ADS
Before the metropolis converted to digital, before the internet became symbiotic with modern culture, print ads were still a viable way to communicate your idea or product. Print ads worked for comic book readers, magazine subscribers, and those who frequented used bookstores.
This article is part of the on-going series “RAMCPU for sabukaru”. Examining the intersection of art, information and aesthetics, RAMCPU shares his uniquely critical perspective on contemporary art and media to shape the discourse between various discipline and schools of thought.
In 1996, Playstation produced a flyer for the Glastonbury festival to promote their first gaming console. The advert featured the PlayStation logo and the words "More Powerful than God." This promotional material stirred some controversy and foreshadowed the adoption of subversive adverts Playstation would later be known for decades.
Along with the innovations of interactive 3D technology that Playstation helped pioneer, also came games developed for maturer audiences. Games like Max Payne, Grand Theft Auto III, and The Metal Gear Series, to name just a few. These maturer games helped usher a series of design stances that justified utilizing late 90s club culture, Corporate Grunge, and GEN X Soft-Club designs as a guiding ethos. These aesthetics became the muse for PS2 print advertisements.
Video and print ads for Playstation looked similar to films like Trainspotting, The Matrix, and Requiem for a Dream. One PS2 commercial features a raining car at night sequence, which is eerily similar to when Neo finds himself in the backseat of Trinity's car in The Matrix (1999).
Even director David Lynch directed a couple of PS2 promos, one of which shows an invincible doe totaling a vehicle when an absent-minded driver hits the animal.
The tagline: "Different Place. Different Rules" appears on-screen not before we see the red pickup truck mangled from the collision, while the small deer, "Bambi," prances away from the wreckage unscathed.
This phrase, "Different Place. Different Rules," is perhaps the thematic commonality of almost all the PS2 promotional material of the late 90s and early 2000s.
The simple idea was to make the mundane happenings of typical daily life collide head-on with the most obscure and surreal abstractions. If Salvador Dali were around to do campaign marketing material for PS2, maybe it would have looked something like this.
By utilizing the punk, industrial, and dystopian arrangements set forth by various underground club movements and films like Fight Club (1999) and Blade (1998), Sony's Playstation captured a sense of fear and unease in their print adverts. These images targeted an older audience; they let gamers know that no matter your age, gaming could now be part of everyone's everyday life (as it collides with even the most underground street movements).
To illustrate this abstraction, in the film, The Matrix, Neo lived a dull life as a white-collar worker. Yet, his mundane activity was flipped upside down when he found himself interrogated by Agent Smith (not unlike being interrogated by his company boss). This juxtaposition, the monotony of being interrogated by one's manager, was later abstracted by the surreal and similar encounter with Agent Smith. Similarly, the ads for PlayStation worked in the same way, and Sony brought a sense of danger, macabre, and excitement to the otherwise uneventful.
During the late 90s and early 2000s, corporate culture was becoming more robust. More offices and cubicles were built, and less laborious jobs were in demand. With computers and the internet extending their reach into the cultural zeitgeist, corporate politics was born, and with office, politics came fears of one trapped in their sedentary profession. Add in the loss of personal motivation and the dread of being subject to your supervisor's passive-aggressive emails, and you've got a Sony ad campaign that resonates with the US and EU market in a way that has not yet been replicated.
The newly found stationary lives formed in offices worldwide led to a collective feeling of unfulfillment. Sony used aspects of this cultural zeitgeist to excite illusions of grandeur among workers and players from all backgrounds. Even today, we can see that modern aesthetics in gaming has its roots in the Playstation's legacy of promotion; before becoming a more subdued brand, Playstation's marketing team led a campaign that broke every rule in the book.
About the author:
RAMCPU is a writer, philosopher, and creator of the media theory known as Arcadism. RAM writes about media, art, arcades. and internet subcultures.
His weekly newsletter is entitled "Arcade Press".
