Whether you like it or not, advertising is everywhere, and it's always been everywhere--which is why the jingle for some now-nonexistent product has likely obliterated some important memory in your brain. And video games, being a product that's sold for money, have never been a stranger to advertising. On this first part of a two-part series, join Bob Mackey ... Show More
Yesterday
777: Capcom's Platformer Legacy {’90s}
Jeremy Parish, Stuart Gipp, and Patrick Kulikowski drop another quarter into the machine to continue talking about the platform action games that Capcom developed, this time in the 1990s. Only some of them are Mega Mans!Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patr ... Show More
1h 50m
Jun 22
776: The Golden Age of Pinball
Believe it or not, in nearly 20 years of Retronauts, we've never produced an episode dedicated to pinball. And the topic has barely been mentioned in passing! While pinball isn't necessarily a "video game," it shares the same spaces as arcade cabinets, and has incorporated screen ... Show More
1h 6m
Jun 2024
Ridiculous Video Game Tie-ins, Part One: The Rise of Cool Spot -- and Fall of the Noid
Cast your memories back to the strange days of the 1980s and 1990s -- boy howdy, things were weird. At some point, marketing executives the world round realized that video games could be a new, powerful field of advertising. In the first part of this special two-part series, Ben, ... Show More
38m 18s
Sep 2022
NBN Classic: Mark Bartholomew, "Adcreep: The Case Against Modern Marketing" (Stanford Law Books, 2017)
This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time.
Advertising is everywhere. By some estimates, the average American is exposed to over 3,000 advertisements each day. Whether we realize it or not, "adcreep"―mod ... Show More
1h 11m