10 Outrageous Video Game Adverts That Caused Major Controversy

7. Mega Drive - "The More You Play With It, The Harder It Gets"

Sega Ad Sega's Mega Drive adverts aimed at the UK market were incredibly brazen, and frankly, it's amazing to believe they ever got away with it. The most famous of the lot is the "Play With it, The Harder It Gets" ad pictured above, which describes in the finer print that players will be "squeezing knob", and "shooting all over the place". Other ads in the campaign were brazenly sexist ("female players may find difficulties with higher skill levels") and crude (depicting a man urinating the Sega logo in the snow), and one even opted to compare breasts with testicles for the sake of using the phrase, "Which pair will be the biggest on the beach this summer?" A similar campaign for the Sega Game Gear contained yet another masturbatory reference ("Something to do with your hands that won't make you go blind"), and though these ads are clearly trying to be shocking, only the most middle-class, middle-minded sort was probably truly offended by them; they're simply trying too hard to appeal to the lads mag demographic to be anything more than desperate.
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Frequently sleep-deprived film addict and video game obsessive who spends more time than is healthy in darkened London screening rooms. Follow his twitter on @ShaunMunroFilm or e-mail him at shaneo632 [at] gmail.com.