Article 30—sega summer ces promo
video (1994)
Here’s a VHS tape that Sega’s
public relations staff handed out to the press at the Summer
Consumer Electronics Show in 1994. It’s a low-fi jumble
of cheesy green-screen video effects, lame writing and
cringe-inducing butt-rock background music. Sega’s
success in the Genesis era owed a great deal to San
Francisco-based ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners
and its edgy “Welcome to the Next Level” campaign
(including the popular “Sega Scream”), but
I’m guessing that GS&P was not involved in the
production of this video, aside from the one embedded TV
commercial and the recycled clips from existing ads. It’s
likely that Sega’s internal marketing team put it
together in an attempt to mimic the style of the GS&P ads,
with awkward results. I mean, “Welcome to the Next Living
Room”? What does that even mean?
The most noteworthy element of this
confounding promo is the celebrity who was chosen to be the
Sega spokesman: It’s none other than R&B legend Lou
Rawls. Because
when you’re marketing video games to
hyperactive kids, there’s no better person to deliver
your message than a 61-year-old soul singer whose career
arguably peaked in 1977. To his credit, Rawls makes the most of
his smooth voice and cheerful presence, somehow managing to get
through the presentation with most of his dignity intact.
He’s clearly having fun as he floats through the demented
video-game apocalypse into which he has been clumsily
superimposed; he even sneaks in his favorite phrase
(“yeah buddy”) and a few bars of his biggest hit,
“You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine.”
There are several instances in which his silky baritone voice
actually goes deep enough to distort the microphone! And his is
not the only deep voice in this promo:
Longtime NFL Films narrator Harry Kalas can
also be heard in the Sega Sports commercial about halfway
through the video.
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In addition to showing us his nauseating
virtual living room (where he apparently watches Tony Bennett
performances on his squiggly neon TV), Rawls gives us a rundown
of Sega’s 1994 offerings. They include Dynamite Headdy, Ecco: The Tides of Time and several games in the “Sega Club”
series for younger players. (Creative
Antics was a very early version of Wacky Worlds Creativity Studio.) The ill-fated 32X add-on is also featured
prominently. There’s even a brief teaser for Sonic & Knuckles with
no gameplay footage at all; only the box art and illustrations
of Sonic and Knuckles are shown.
All of this will be familiar to Sega fans,
but there are a few quick glimpses of an interesting game that
was never released. In the 32X segment, the unidentified
submarine scenes are from a little-known adventure game called Shadow of Atlantis.
It’s not one of the more notorious
unreleased games, but I’ll bet that the people who worked
on it have quite a story to tell. If I remember correctly, it
was originally conceived as a Sega CD game but languished in
development for years, even into the Saturn era. My memory on
this subject may not be completely reliable, but I could swear
that I once attended a lavish Shadow
of Atlantis-themed party during the
week of the first Electronic Entertainment Expo in 1995. It was
not some little cocktail party, either. Sega actually rented
the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, set up Shadow of Atlantis demo
kiosks and invited hundreds of people, including a handful of
celebrity guests. I saw former Ozzy Osbourne/Quiet Riot bassist
Rudy Sarzo there; this would have been just after his tenure
with Whitesnake. I think there was even a live performance by
the industrial dance band My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult.
All in the name of some full-motion video game that never even
made it to store shelves!
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