Tagged: Promo Man

Ken Griffey Jr.’s Winning Run (1996), Ken Griffey Jr.’s Slugfest (1999), ABC Monday Night Football (1993)

~ Are you ready for some sports… thiiiiiings!? ~ That’s how the tune goes right? I’m not a big sports game guy but over the years I picked up a few different merchandising tchotchkes. First was the Monday Night Football plastic cup from Data East that I got at CES 1992. For the longest time it held all my other tchotchkes from CES.

In 1995 I was working a high school job at Meijer and would look forward to visits from our Nintendo rep. She’d drop off posters and water bottles and keychains like this one (bottom) for Ken Griffey Jr.’s Winning Run on SNES. It was especially well balanced so if you had your pointer finger through the key ring you could swing the bat and ball back and forth in a satisfying twitch.

Four years later in 1999 Nintendo was promoting Ken Griffey Jr.’s Slugfest on N64 with this baseball glove keychain (top) at E3 and other events. It didn’t feel good at all but held the oversized baseball from the other keychain almost perfectly.

How do you convey the gore and violence of Mortal Kombat 3 without printing just another ad filled with severed limbs and soaked with blood? You raid a clip art archive for images of painful looking torture devices. I think the solution was pretty elegant at the time, making for a much more memorable — even stylish — ad that implies the pain and torment of the game without showing anything.

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One of the sore points as a Sega fan was missing out on Castlevania. Seeing Simon Belmont brandish his floppy whip and jump across huge swinging sprites in Super Castlevania IV always made me jealous.

But finally, in 1994, the series came to the Genesis and it was — oh, what is this!? It’s not even a Belmont? Some French guy? This… doesn’t look as fabulous as Castlevania IV or Dracula X.

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