Was the Future Meant to Look Like a PlayStation Ad?

SONY’s PlayStation 2 imagined a future where technology made us more in touch with ourselves, not less.

A professional athlete usually retires by the time they hit 30, but as a professional gamer, your career ends even sooner. Hand-eye coordination weakens by the early twenties. Eyes grow red and sore, and body faculties deteriorate from years spent with hands on a desk, vigorously clicking mice and WASD keys, and crouching inward towards a screen. All of a sudden you hit 25. Your body is constantly afflicted by carpal tunnel syndrome, by pain on your elbows, shoulders, neck, and back, and you are too weak to remain a professional gamer.

“25, 26 years [is] absolutely maximum for esports,” Alexander Kokhanovski, manager for the Ukrainian pro gaming organization Na’Vi, said in the 2014 documentary Free to Play. “[By] 27, 28, 29, 30, your reaction time is lowering. You can’t click [as] much as the kids do.”

So it might happen on a screen, but playing video games is a visceral, embodied experience: Left-clicking in rapid succession, firing an AK in Counter Strike; spamming a seance-like sequence on your keyboard to cast spells in Skyrim. Your heart palpitates and your body warms while holding SHIFT to sprint away from The Slender Man or the zombies in Minecraft. Switch to console and the experience is even more tactile: thumbs twisting and disfiguring and turning like the bodies of your fighter-of-choice in Tekken; face and palms sweating, voice breaking over shit-talking in a Wii Sports boxing match or a neck-and-neck game of FIFA. There’s an ailment called “gamers thumb,” the Washington Post once reported, in which a player’s thumb muscles freeze in place after extended periods holding a controller. Gaming’s effects are deeply inscribed on the body.

The physicality of gaming might no longer be a fringe view, especially in a world where the IOC is legitimizing esports alongside traditional sports, though I imagine that this was less often acknowledged when gaming was more a niche subculture in the early 2000s. This does, however, seem to have been understood by SONY, when the company first launched ad campaigns for the PlayStation 2:

Early PlayStation ads: buttons bursting from veins and nipples.

Shapes of buttons on the PlayStation—squares, triangle, “X,” “O,”—are bursting through the veins in one man’s arms, or taking the shape of nipples that you can cheekily see through a shirt. Here, human and console fused together. Gaming, for SONY, was physical, its effects visibly etched on the body.

A 2001 campaign in France underscores this idea even more: One banner depicted PlayStation buttons drawn as bursting blood vessels in a bloodshot-red eye. Subtly, near the bottom, the very tip of a thumb is pulling down on the eyelid, as if for a pupil examination. Was the person photographed playing video games till 5am? Or were they on a mix of different substances?

From the same campaign, a “kill count” is inscribed as a tattoo on the shoulder of a tanned, sweaty, bare-chested male. Another print presents bloodied footprints leaving the ladder of a pool of blood. “[Back] when life was one big vampire rave,” as one user on Facebook seems to recall, describing the campaign. That’s likely a reference to the opening of the vampire action film Blade, where a rave takes place behind a derelict butchery, and the party ends in a literal bloodbath—hot human blood pouring down from sprinklers above.

But the most playful of them might be this PlayStation 2 ad from Australia, where the buttons on the controller take the shape of unused condoms. “Be careful,” the copywriting on the bottom left reads:

It’s odd looking back at campaigns so risqué—alluding to sex and drugs, or making them explicit outright. These ads launched before I could even hold a controller, but at no point in my early life playing video games do I remember the subculture being, well, like this at all. There was less raunch in 2010 gamer culture, more Discord furries and 30-year-old mom’s basement dwellers.

But these racy creative decisions might make more sense once you consider the kind of novelty the PlayStation 2 offered. It’s a hard story to remember in the age of constant “disruption” by AI, but the PS2 was one of the very first video game consoles that could credibly simulate the laws of physics. As a 1999 article in WIRED notes, “Not only does the PlayStation II boast incredible raw graphics power, it also has the power to simulate the physical properties of real world objects, including the behavior of animals and humans.” The laws of physics were no longer the domain of meatspace or the real world. With the PS2, they could happen in a virtual environment, in a device that any consumer could buy.

Part of why the PlayStation 2 was so massively successful was also because it doubled as a DVD player—for around the same price, a household could buy a device that both played movies and ran their child’s favorite video games. Advocates of an alternative history of the PS2 say that its users were the early proponents of the DVD format (former Sony CEO Howard Stringer once argued this in a 2007 interview). That might not be wholly correct, but in Japan, more than 60 percent of participants in a 2000 survey said they were using the PS2 primarily as a DVD player. The technology was sold and used as a multipurpose media device—an all-in-one technology that reminds me of the ways humans use LLMs today: as writers, coders, image generators, therapists, friends.

But even when so much was disrupted, SONY’s campaign made the future look fun and exciting. Its intense physicality told us that new technology would be interfaced onto our reality, rather than divorce us from it. The motifs from this high-tech future borrowed from body modification and rave subcultures—it made us more in touch with ourselves, not less. It was escapism, but the kind that grounded you into physical reality, comparing playing video games to a bloodied dance floor behind a butchery or the thrill of a one-night-stand.

There is a growing sense that campaigns by SONY and similar tech companies imagined a “lost future” we collectively forgot. In a retrospective on Y2K-era technology ads, someone wrote, “The future looked great in the past.” “Notice how raw and real some of these are. The cultural aspects of today really have changed,” another user said in a similar post on Reddit. Perfectly Imperfect, the New York City-based “social” magazine, seems to have similar frustrations, sharing a mini-archive of “HORNY 2000S NINTENDO ADS” romanticizing old tech: “The way I feel about the Nintendo DS is a deep and profound soul connection,” reads the accompanying text, a far cry from the alienation many feel toward technology today.

Not to state the obvious here, but much of this has to do with the general dissatisfaction with the future that AI companies are presenting us with. AI is disrupting the economy, our collective sense of reality, our social institutions, and widely-shared morals. But, if you look at the recent campaigns by ChatGPT and Anthropic, these technologies wrap themselves in warm, neutral tones and gentle Sans Serif fonts. They place themselves seamlessly in daily life, in a mother’s home cooking over an afternoon, at a teenager’s gym session, or while fixing a beige 80s hatchback. The muted banality presents these technologies as inevitable—as if they were no different to how we use stoves and washing machines.

But no amount of sterile, filmic humanwashing can distract us from how people really feel about AI: “that something massive, uncontrollable, and fundamentally unknowable is unfolding. Trying to signal harmlessness through aesthetic softness only makes it more unsettling,” strategist Nadia Gopal recently wrote. “To truly win consumers, brands can’t downplay disruption, they have to reimagine it. Show us the alternative version of the apocalypse.”

I’m inclined to agree. I struggle to truly be optimistic about humanity’s future with AI. But I’m wondering how these companies might create a world we want to be a part of—if that’s even possible at all. Could they, like the old SONY ads people are now romanticizing, bring about a future where radical change is something we look forward to rather than shy away from? I have my doubts, but if the future was made to be a little more sensual and exciting, maybe my opinion could change.

@perfectlyimperfect

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