this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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Nah this is still corpo bullshit. It's also one of the tamer specimens of that era. The only difference is, the corpos in charge of advertising at that time were all sentient hardons who heard stories about how drugs are and peaked at 14. None of them lived in the real world and they just churned out knee-jerk sexist bullshit because they wanted to appeal to boys going through puberty and men that never left that headspace.
I ended up chasing gameplay and trying to ignore how fucking awkward and immature most of the shooters were in that era and I don't think I was alone. I think a lot of gamers grew up and drove the market in a slightly more mature direction. Some people blame woke bullshit, but for me it was just being utterly sick of how fucking juvenile everything was and voting with my money. There's still a vocal minority out there that wants the good old days back, but I'd stop playing if the industry went back to exclusively 3xtr33m l33t 4ct10n d00d bullshit.
Sidenote: I played the demo for some Cliffy B game a decade ago on my XBox and hard-quit and deleted when the guy on my comms told me to "fire a rocket directly up the bad guy's poop chute." I was in my 30s and Cliff was probably pushing 40 at the time. What the hell? Are we nine years old again? Then again, he was the guy that threw his cat into his scanner and posted a picture of it every day until the internet told him to stop. Ugh. Let's never go back there.
It really took the industry a long time to get out of that, too. It was all through the early 2000's, and people forget, also had wonderful shit like:
this, which should have taken that franchise down. People just gloss over it now like 'oh yeah, haha, people were just like that back in... 2009!? Oh, shit, uh...'
(EDIT: Feel free to explain your downvote, you miss ads like this?)
Not the downvoter, but i appereciate how the punchline of the ad wasn't explicitly spelled out, despite the punchline being "slur funny."
I feel like we tolerated the assholes of the time because, immature though they were, they were the life of the party, which was "the point" of gaming for a demographic, to be the exact opposite of work in every way.
We need high-energy, charismatic, boundary pushing people if we want games that are fresh and innovative. Unfortunately, those tendencies can amplify the worst in us. But we don't need to tolerate asholism for the sake of entertainment, its never worth it.
Hard disagree there, particularly as someone who worked in the industry, has a gay kid, and worked with women in the industry. The 'frat boy' stuff was amusing to 13 year old fans, sure, but it was abusive, cruel, and awful to be anywhere near. There's a billion different ways to achieve the same objective without being homophobic, sexist, etc, like say this masterpiece response to said ad.
Lol that's awful. 2009?!
Yes, and I really hope more people see this. It was an embarrassment, and people tried to quickly forget. Before they did though, we got to see the absolute art piece that was the Battlefield teams response.
Yeah that's actually funny. Calling it FRAGS is just the icing.
Now that it's less broken, I've been playing Cyberpunk a lot and it feels like edgy shit done correctly. All the big tough guys are actually just weirdos enamored with the sound of their own voice, the ads are ludicrously over the top, it's bloody, and everyone's a human being. I haven't felt gross with any of the content in it so far and it has at least as many strippers as Duke 3D had. I think the loud edgelords keep trying to paint it as free speech vs censorship but it's really about not making players complicit in whatever infantile world view the director has.
I’m 41 now, so I was around for all that stuff. I must admit, I love those old ’90s and early ’00s games like Duke Nukem. I was also going through puberty at the time, so there’s that nostalgic factor.
I don’t think those days are ever coming back, and I’m okay with that. I enjoyed those games at the time, but I can now see how others may have found them offensive—something I never really considered back then. Many of those ads and games were a product of their time, reflecting the MTV era, which, as we know, eventually gave way to reality TV, for better or worse.
These days, it seems like we’ve evolved in some ways but regressed in others, with thousands of porn games on Steam, which is definitely not my thing. I appreciate that the industry has matured and is now more inclusive and diverse. While there’s still room for improvement, I’m glad to see that gaming can offer more sophisticated and varied content that appeals to a broader audience.