Nintendo 64 ad: Fun

It’s been a few years since I did one of these. It’s fairly straight forward, it’s an ad that repeats FUN three times in big letters and then has a bit of text to describe it. That’s about all there is to it. The ad seems to come from some time before the release of the console, probably spring-summer 1996 in a magazine in the USA.

Of course the obvious part is that the image repeats the same word thrice in a huge font, taking up a good three quarters of the screen. It then goes again and repeats it twice within the body copy, this time in sentence format. This is really overpowering, so much so that you barely notice the text in between it, it just looks like horizontal separators. Someone flipping through a magazine will just read those huge words and maybe notice the N64 logo. Which, come to think of it, might cause someone to believe that the ad is just trying to be manipulative.

The text in between only describes one game in it, Pilotwings. This makes sense since it coincides with the US release of the console and Pilotwings was a launch title. You can also see Lark in the background there. It’s nice to see that Mario isn’t in the mix since SM64 took up a large part of the spotlight. This makes it a nice and modest little ad.

The last thing I like to point out in this is all the TMs in this ad. I know they have to keep it there for legal reasons, but it does seem a bit cheesy. It takes the whole ‘fun’ out of it, don’t you think?