Mean Machines VHS promo tapes
I packed up my childhood a long time ago.
My parent’s house is filled with boxes containing old magazines, video games, sporting trophies and the like.
It’s also 2000 kilometres away. So I don’t get to visit as often as I’d like. But whenever I do go home for the holidays I’ll always unpack a box or two to see what treasures are contained within.
Most recently, I found the Mean Machines (Sega) VHS promo tapes they gave away with the magazine around 1992. There’s the Sonic 2 preview tape and the Mega CD promo.
I hadn’t watched these in nearly 30 years, but it didn’t take long for the memories to come flooding back. The Mega CD one in particular is a lost classic, and a nod to weird early 90s styling.
The good news is anyone can watch them online via YouTube.. So let’s do that.
Tape #1. Sonic 2 promo, aka ‘The cyber razor cut’.
Professional intro aside, this promo shows just how much things have changed over the years, and how stage-managed the industry is these days.
Sonic 2 looks amazing, but the video then segues into the sleep-inducing Greendog (the Beached Surfer dude), a game so dull and lifeless even the person playing it for the video seems to give-up halfway through in an attempt to end the tedium and bring on the ‘game over’ screen’. I don’t blame them.
Several other games are previewed on the tape, but no one seems overly concerned about the way they’re presented. The driver in Super Monaco GP 2 crashes out of the race, and whoever is playing Aliens 3 has a rare talent for running into every xenomorph in the vicinity.
For a modern analogy, imagine a promo video of Cuphead played by the reviewer that couldn’t figure out the double jump in the tutorial.
Tape #2. Mega CD promo, aka ‘Your ticket to ride’
In case you forgot, the live-action intro characterises the Mega CD as an attractive woman in skin tight leather pants. She struts around for a bit before ‘morphing’ into the new Mega Drive add-on. Because reasons…
There’s a pretentious ‘this is art’ vibe to the whole thing. Which I can only assume is the work of a frustrated Creative Director.
Get past the initial weirdness and this one is kinda great. Sewer Shark’s gameplay may be more basic than a 7-11 coffee, but there’s a great kinetic energy to the live action pieces they’ve stitched together. These segues nicely into the CD exclusive driving sections of Batman Returns, before dove-tailing into the Kriss Kross Make My Video ‘game’.
Watching this again some 30 years later I find myself once again ‘hyped’ for the Mega CD and willing to forget the last three decades ever happened. Will I dig up my Mega CD, connect it to the Mega Drive, and try to find all the requisite cables so that I can boot up Road Avenger, Final Fight or the handful of other titles I own? No, I’m not crazy. But the thought did cross my mind for half a second. So credit where credit is due.
When I posted an image of these old VHS tapes to the Twitter account, former Mean Machines editor Julian ‘Jaz’ Rignall was kind enough to leave a comment and add some context.
As he recalls, “It certainly seemed like an insane idea at the time to put VHS tapes on the covers of magazines, but we thought that it was a brilliant way for readers to experience the games that we featured. In the era before YouTube and the ‘net these tapes were the next best thing!”
“We increased the price of the magazine for that month to cover costs. The distributors hated the tapes and we made no additional profit, but the readers absolutely loved them. Very glad we made them for sure.”
So, to borrow an idiom - you can never really go home… But you can find some treasures lying about your folks’ place when visiting for the holidays.
