10 Worst Video Game Adverts Of All Time
6. Sega Does What NintenDON'T - Mega Drive
Oscar Wilde famously said, "One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards." To put it another way - Only the loser plays dirty.
Unfortunately, that's exactly what Sega did during the 1990s. Furious that the Nintendo Entertainment System outperformed the Master System, Sega decided to be more aggressive with their advertising campaign for their successor, the Genesis.
The Genesis commercials emphasised everything the console could do, and more importantly, what Nintendo's successor, the Super Nintendo, couldn't do. To hammer this belief in, these adverts regularly concluded with the iconic tagline, “Genesis does what NintenDON’T.”
These adverts claimed the Genesis was the superior system due to harbouring a blast-processing chip, which allowed characters like Sonic the Hedgehog appear to move at incredible speed.
However, the SNES was better in nearly every other department, background scaling, sprites, colour palettes, max resolution, audio, and over a hundred times more colours. Basically, the Genesis's hardware had one advantage over the SNES, forcing Sega to oversell it.
This argument isn't to suggest these adverts are badly shot or edited. But these bullying tactics made Sega come across as misleading, childish, and desperate.