Bro, 2010 is retro now

Those few years between 1992-1998 were as .. game-changing .. for games as probably the two decades that followed. We started it with side scrollers, Dune and Doom and ended it with Diablo II, StarCraft and Half-Life.

For the kids here who haven't experienced Half-Life, you should play Black Mesa. For the retro farts who have played Half-Life, you should also play Black Mesa. It's the Half-Life you couldn't have in 1998 because of the slow hardware. I weeped from feels playing it.

Bro, we lost that fight. I was watching a Youtube video of a guy clearing games from his Steam backlog and introduced one with, "So, many of you watching probably weren't alive when this game came out. Everyone talks about what a classic this is, but I don't think I've met anyone who has actually played this game."

I died a little inside when it turned out he was talking about the first Half-Life.

If in 1998 you would have argued that 1972 is retro, then I'm sorry to tell you that 1998 is retro

I understand saying you don't feel like 2010 is retro, but 1998? That's been retro for a long time. You're in a really extreme place in your head when you stick to not calling something that's 25 years old retro.

You mean the late 1900's

It really sucks looking at the detrimental effect this had on gender ratios in gaming to this day. It's gotten a lot better but it's still not there yet.

It's not really nostalgic for me, TBH. It's actually kind of embarrassing that marketing like this existed and that it worked. I love T&A as much as the next female-loving guy, but ads like this are condescending. But again, they sold units...

There were lots of half-naked men, too. Including in this ad.

Most of them in games were more male fantasy stuff...ripped, shirtless dudes with big weapons. Not really appealing to most women, but checks the "I want to BE him" aspect for lots of guys, lol

I can imagine. I'm glad this is less prevalent now. Seeing it now in middle age makes me go ick. I wished I had been much more aware of this kind of sexism as a boy.

I was a senior in high school at the time and even back then I thought this kind of advertising was crass, gross, and unnecessary. No nostalgia here, just second-hand embarrassment.

The weird thing is, as a guy, I never even paid attention to the sexualized stuff in games. To me these are like two different brain activities. So, as far as I'm concerned, there was never any point in this kind of marketing. I've never in my life purchased a game because it featured sexy ladies.

Yeah as a boy I didn't like these either. They were sexy but made me feel a little weird. I was young enough not to realize it was targeting only boys, but now that I'm older I think that's why I didn't like them. I wasn't in to sex at the time.

Yeah. Even just around a decade ago I'd explain the demographics shift to more women gamers to clients and they'd not believe it.

Stereotypes stick around for a long time, even when (or maybe especially when) untrue.

It's a shame that "girl gamers" were considered such a rarity when it really seemed like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

"Oh, a game with only male protagonists with activities only primarily associated with boys doesn't have many girls playing it? I guess girls aren't that into games and we should double down on the focus on dudes."

As a result, the market effectively abandoned around half of two generations of a potential continued audience and had a significantly reduced pool of interested labor to make games.

It's a bit frustrating given my love for games that they could likely have advanced even further had it not been an exclusionary industry for as long as it was (though that can be said about pretty much every business vertical in existence too given our generalized collective history of exclusion).

That's not an ad. That's just some cosplayer showing off her muff.