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Holiday Treat #21: Christmas 1993 with Sunsoft!

Added 2023-12-20 14:29:39 +0000 UTC

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It’s the holidays, and we know what gift you probably want this year: Games! And what better way to learn about this season’s hottest new games than an infomercial?

This is a segment from “At Home For The Holidays,” featuring the 1993 holiday game lineup from Sunsoft. We don’t have much information about what “At Home For The Holidays” was, but it seems like it was a series of sponsored commercials for different products, and in this case, that product is Sunsoft games.

This infomercial came right on the heels of the video game moral panic of the 90s, so the presenters put a lot of emphasis on the idea that games like Aero the Acrobat “don’t have to be excessively violent to be fun.” They also mention that video games are useful for “assimilating [...] children into the modern age,” which is a weird way to put it, but it shows how much the industry was trying to push the positive benefits of video games at this time.

This tape is part of an extensive collection of business and marketing records kept by Rita Zimmerer, a former executive at Sunsoft. We're in the early stages of processing this collection, and can't wait to show you more next year!