The angry black guy spouting off from this 1993 commercial is another example of SEGA's "Welcome To The Next Level" campaign. And as effective as it might have been selling the Genesis, it didn't quite fare nearly as well with anything else SEGA had to peddle, like their CD-ROM based attachment.
This ad for Final Fantasy IV is yet another example of the power of just brand name recognition, allowing a game to be advertised without having a single second of gameplay footage. Also another example of how much more playful and abstract Japanese gaming commercials tended to be as a whole. It doesn't get more pointless than this.
The 90s also saw the rise of the fighting game genre. In the end, Street Fighter would reign supreme, but early on it was a heated contest between it and Mortal Kombat. Most remember the commercial for the first console port with kids running around in the streets, but the one for part two is simply cooler with its high production values that were also indicative of something that was a bona fide video game phenomena.
Nintendo's SNES commercials early on were entirely forgettable, and a primary reason why they lost the mind share of their primary demographic. Nintendo didn't take SEGA seriously and they paid the price. Meanwhile, in Japan things were different. Nintendo's 16-bit machine would end up reigning supreme due to awesome ads like this one for Zelda 3.
