It’s Black Friday weekend, which means video game sales are rolling out (if they haven’t already where you live). The PS4 and Xbox One are in high demand, and we’re getting games like Star Wars: Battlefront, Lego Dimensions, and Fallout 4. The amazing thing is, I don’t see commercials on television for many of these games anymore. This may be due to changes in how gamers get their news, so most of these ads are limited to the Internet.

Thinking about this, I turned to the Internet to see how games were advertised in the past for systems I played as a kid (I’m still behind the times with a PS2 and Wii, but even those aren’t for the games I turn on to relax).

This set of ads features 21 classic games from the 80s and 90s, including the original Super Mario trilogy, Paperboy, a Dr. Mario commercial that is nothing but bigotry, and an epic Darth Vader interlude for the original NES Star Wars game.

The commercials for the Sega Genesis hardly try not mentioning their competitor, Nintendo. In fact, at 3:43, the “Genesis Does” ad states “You can’t do this on Nintendo.” With current laws governing slander in advertisements, I don’t think this would be seen unless the line was changed to “the other guy.” I am still impressed though about the Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker game that existed.

Those who grew up in the ’80s remember the Toys-R-Us jingle “I don’t wanna grow up, I’m a Toys-R-Us kid.” This 1988 holiday commercial for the store doesn’t use the popular song, but does include a rather creepy Geoffrey the Giraffe leading a young child through the aisles to the video game section though, where they find the “Nintendo Action Set, including the control deck with double game pack and zapper light gun” (apparently that’s what it was called) for a whopping $99.99. Those were the days.

Finally, a commercial almost as bad as the game itself, a game that had an even shorter lifespan than the new Jem and the Holograms movie – E.T. If you have seen the documentary Atari: Game Over or Video Games: The Movie, you will know that the E.T. game for the Atari was so bad that Atari refused to put too much footage from the game play in the ad as not to dissuade people from buying the game. Since the game was due to be released at a critical time for sales during the Christmas season, it, and the commercial, were rushed through production. The game had not been finished when the commercial was to be filmed, so they only provided one good scene from the game to show, expecting to improve the remainder of the game in the meantime. This, of course, never happened. So we have a Santa-clad E.T. walking into a random family’s home to play the E.T. video game. The game received massive attention when it was released since the movie was very popular, but most stores returned more copies than they sold due to overproduction and consistent customer returns once people actually played the game and realized their hopes were false.

So there you have it. Marketing is everything, unless the game is so bad that even that will not help.