ad being analyzed: https://www.flickr.com/photos/paxtonholley/4564987803/in/photostream/
This 1990 video game advertisement is known as “The Uncanny X-Men” for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). This ad shows several impressive features for its time, which has led the game to sell quite a few units for the time. Ironically, the game itself was sadly not very playable; however, the ad deceived the buyers into making them disregard its flaws; thus, succeeding in its primary goal: promote the new X-Men game so beautifully that it tricks people into buying their game. Something else interesting, within the ad lies another advertisement for an upcoming LJN game for the game boy titled “The Amazing Spider-Man,” but it is made small to ensure the focus is on the current game. After analyzing all of this ad’s aspects, it’s no surprise that people were so excited to buy the game.
The characters in the image are all big and close together, each one facing different directions executing either a battle-like or super heroic pose. This makes the audience know what kind game this is even if people don’t know who any of the characters are. Judging from the superhero cast combined with the flashy colors in the background, one can infer the target audience is for children, fans of superheroes, and X-Men fans. These heroes are not just any random picked marvel characters thrown in a game, they’re all part of a team that’s known as the uncanny X-Men, (hence the name of the game) and some characters has particular purposes in the ad. Notice the hero with the claws are in the front of everyone else even though this team supposedly has no leader. The ad designers done this to make marvel’s most popular character stand out from the rest of the cast. The design for the hero shooting a giant laser beam from his eye mask could be because lasers are very “cool” to the young audience. The gray hero in the furthest back is flexing in a cocky manner, but he has a serious look on his face. Possibly made just to show he is a hero with boasting strength and strong sense of justice.
Each type of text has a purpose in this ad, and it’s all organize by color, size, and placement. For example, the designers wanted to make it clear that the furthest top text, “uncanny action,” is just enhancing the title and not part of it. To do this, they made the “uncanny action text” white, made the actual title text yellow, and placed them at a distance. That made it so people will know “the uncanny X-men” is the title because it’s the biggest text, the color stands out, and it’s placed next to the heroes. Notice the text “X-Men” and “Spider-man” both have a 3D style of artwork along with different fonts than the rest of the letters in their titles. The designers wanted those names to stand out specifically for the audience familiar with marvel heroes. The text “uncanny action” at the top of the ad was added to correspond with the title in an attempt to make the game sound more appealing. There’s also small white text right under the title that contains the game description. Notice how the first few words states “X-Men fans! “ It grabs the audience’s attention and directs them to read the game description.
The rest of the text represents some copyright information; however, most of it is very tiny which made it difficult to read unless examined closely. The reason this text is the smallest was to keep the focus on the promoting details while keeping disclaimer information available in case of lawsuits. All the copyright text include the small white text at the very bottom of the ad, the small text under the LJN rainbow symbol, and the small text above the Nintendo Entertainment System. If you look closely you can also notice there’s a trademark symbol every time the words X-Men are used. This is another form of a copyright tactic for disclaimers who will consider targeting the product.
The colors all greatly correspond to the image. The upper background image behind the heroes is a colorful mixture of blue and white; likely done to see the heroes clearly in the image. On the lower half side of the ad, the lower background is completely black. A black background has been placed somewhere in a lot of NES games at the time, that’s just how the format design for games were back then which got implemented to the ad design. So the way I see it, the upper background is the attention getter, uses bright visual colors and recognizable characters to attract the audience, while the black background holds the extra info like the game description, company logos, etc. If the background was another color like red and blue instead of blue and black, it simply wouldn’t look as effective. Something else to note, the overall colors appear dim which makes the image look very faded. Even the two screenshots that display the gameplay look faded as if the game screen has some sort of color tint to it. To be fair, this did come out in 1990, so the printing could have just been undeveloped