[JPN RetroAd Archive] Tiny Toon Adventures,Dodge Danpei,Ginga Ojou-sama Densetsu,Lennus and Ogre Battle

 A series exploring Japanese video game magazine advertisements

Beyond Pixels

A CRT screen could only push so many pixels. The print ad selling that screen had no such limit — and publishers knew it.

1. After-School TV Memories: Tiny Toon Adventures

Konami's Super Famicom ad for Tiny Toon Adventures (1992) doesn't try to sell you a game so much as pull you straight back to 6 p.m. on a weekday, Warner Bros. cartoons on the TV. Against a wash of primary colors, the tagline reads: "If it's a fun adventure, great. With cheerful companions, more than welcome" — which tells you everything about the mood this ad is chasing.

There's no attempt at a screenshot grid here. Buster Bunny, Babs Bunny, and Plucky Duck are rendered with the same expressive energy as the cartoon itself, and the effect is less "here's the game" and more "here's the show, and you get to be in it."

2. Hudson and the PC Engine Ecosystem

NEC and Hudsonbuilt the PC Engine to go head-to-head with Nintendo, and Hudson's marketing leaned almost entirely on one strategy: borrow the biggest anime and manga names around and let them do the selling. The promo art for Magical Taruruto-kun and Dodge Danpei (1992) is all dynamic panel splits and hot-blooded energy — comic-book pacing translated directly onto a game ad, which was exactly the point. It told players the PC Engine wasn't just a console; it was where their favorite characters actually lived now.

That pitch went further with Ginga Ojou-sama Densetsu Yuna (1992), the ad for one of the earliest CD-ROM² titles. The line "Soon, she becomes your Yuna" is doing something the Tiny Toon and Taruruto-kun ads weren't even attempting — selling intimacy with a character, backed by the promise of full voice acting and an actual vocal theme song. This is the ad where "game" quietly starts meaning "multimedia franchise."

3. When the Screenshot Disappears Entirely: Lennus and Ogre Battle

Then there's a completely different strategy: cut the gameplay screens out of the ad altogether.

Asmik's 1992 campaign for Lennus: Memories of an Ancient Machine is built almost entirely around original art by Hiroyuki Kato and Keisuke Goto — dense, uncanny sci-fi linework on one side of the spread, a floating city and open negative space on the other. Paired with "Welcome to the Lennus World," it reads less like an ad and more like the frontispiece of a novel you'd want to own.

Quest went even further for Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen (1993). One tarot card — No. IV, THE EMPEROR — sits dead center, lit by embers against total darkness. No character roster, no UI, no gameplay footage. Just the taglines: "Gather in the darkness, surrender your soul to the devil. Live in the light, walk the sacred path." A single image and two lines of text somehow carry the entire moral weight the game asks players to sit with. It's hard to imagine a modern publisher greenlighting an ad this confident in silence.

What's striking laid side by side isn't any one of these ads — it's the distance between them. The same medium, the same rough handful of years, and yet one page is selling a Saturday-morning cartoon and the next is selling a tarot card. That range is really the point: print advertising in this era wasn't chasing a house style. It was figuring out, ad by ad, just how far a single printed page could stretch to meet what a game was trying to be.

All promotional images used in this review are sourced from 1990s video game magazine advertisements for review and commentary purposes.