80's comic ads

Do as the expert gamesman Dave Jackson say and buy the board games based upon Pole Position, Q-Bert and Popeye to improve your strategies! Now you finally will defeat your friends in the arcades!

Parker Brothers released in 1983 this James Bond video game for Atari 2600. Each of the four stages of the game is based upon a Bond movie: Diamonds Are Forever, Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only and The Spy Who Loved Me.

This is the TV commercial of the game:

Behold the ultimate spinning tops: The Spinjas! The evil Dread Force wants to deactivate the gravitational field, but the Eliminators will fight them in the arena to avoid it.

Amidar was a video game developed for arcade by Konami in 1981. This is the 1982 home version ad, released by Parker Brothers. The gameplay is very similar to Pac-Man, alternating stages where the player is a gorilla chased by wild warriors and stages where the player is a paint roller chased by pigs. The name of the game and the structure of the stages are inspired in an oriental kind of lottery called Amidakuji.

If this is not strange enough, have a look at the TV commercial:

In 1982 Parker Brothers released for the Atari 2600 one of the first Spider-Man video games. In the game, Spider-Man is climbing a building defusing the Green Goblin’s bombs and avoiding to get killed by the Goblin’s gangs in the windows. When Spider-Man reaches the top of the building fights against the Green Goblin himself.

Don’t miss the TV commercial with the same script in action:

At the end of the 70’s decade the handheld electronic games began to become popular. This is the 1980 advertisement of Wildfire, the electronic pinball released by Parker Brothers the year before.

During the eighties the use of 1-900 numbers became very common. The video game industry also took part of this new trend with hotlines such as the Parker Brothers one.