And this...
I remember Sin and Punishment got a crazy marketing blitz when it was coming out, but none of the ads really made any sense of what the game was. I wonder if its a game with plenty of name recognition but obscure gameplay-wise.
Not particularly. Unless you regularly bought Nintendo power or gaming magazines, the only games that were well known to you were the ones you owned or what was available to rent at your local video store. I'd never even heard of Star Tropics until the 2000's when I started getting into emulation. There was no internet back then where people could learn about these things.
Psycho Fox doesn't really seem like an obscure game. It's one of the most well-known Master System games of all time, after all.
Startropics had a modest marketing push including a TV commercial, it's fully possible that you just missed it.
Again that's a very modern way of looking at it. TV commercials and marketing weren't universal everywhere. TV also wasn't something people watched 24/7 back then and tv commercials didn't air as often as they do now. Advertising was a much smaller part of people's lives back then. As far as kids went, toy commercials were far more prominent than video game ads. I can still picture the ads for creepy crawlies, easy bake ovens, bop it, pogs, those devil stick toys that were popular for a while, or the yak bak. I can't really remember any video game commercials from before the n64/ps1 era. They existed, they just weren't notable enough for me to remember
probably the least known monolith game
TV is half dead and tv commercials are barely relevant anymore, it's not a modern way of thinking about it at all. By the '90s people watched a lot more regular TV than now, and it was probably not so different in the '80s. All the kids I knew saw countless commercials. I hardly see them now since I use adblockers online and I don't watch TV. Though I agree I didn't use to see a ton of video game commercials per se. I read magazines though, they weren't that niche.
Nintendo published that? Damn, I was thinking of it when I thought of games, but I was 100% certain atlus published it.
The things is, those ads weren't universal. We didn't get a lot of the ads that America got where I'm from. There are lots of ads that are fondly remembered from that time that I've never seen before because I'm not American. What I mean by a modern way of thinking is the assumption that everyone, everywhere would have seen the same ads. This is more common now even with adblockers because advertising has become a lot more universal.
First bold is absolutely false, second is more likely.
No. It's definitely true. How often do people just have a tv or screen on in the background playing something these days even when they're doing other things? That was not a thing back then. You couldn't watch tv 24/7 because you didn't necessarily want to watch the shows that were on at a particular time. Binge watching shows also wasn't a thing because you got one episode per week. Movies were a thing you'd gather the family for and pop in a tape. The amount of screen watching has increased exponentially over the last 30 years.
Earthbound was not unknown, if you liked RPGs you knew about it. Sure it was a relatively niche genre for a couple more years, but kids were starting to talk about games like FF6 and Chrono Trigger. LSD was legitimately unknown because it was a Japan-only release.
This is the only correct thing you've said here. So I think we'll have to agree to disagree on the rest, because you absolutely could watch TV 24/7 and people 100% left TV on as background noise, and that's going back to at least the 1980s with the rise of cable and the end of stations signing off in the middle of the night, replacing dead air with infomercials and reruns. Rewrite the history of television viewing habits to fit your argument if you want, but you're simply not telling the truth here.
This boils down to what a person was exposed to, which is why I said obscure will be different to each person. Even in the case of LSD, I doubt many people into gaming are aware of it because the majority of people who play games aren't checking in on enthusiast forums like this. It's a moving target, and that's fine.
