Our Games Will Beat You Senseless!

In the early 1980's, truly challenging videogames held a certain cachet.  At the time, most games didn't have real endings or storylines, there was no online competitive play, and there wasn't anything like an achievement system.  So getting a high score on a tough game was as good as it got for the hardcover videogamer.

Imagic really capitalized on this vibe -- many of their magazine ads featured fictional players blown away, beaten down and driven cartoonishly insane by the difficulty of their games:

 

 

 

Even as late as the 1984 Christmas season, after Imagic had been absorbed into Activision during a wave of industry consolidation, computer game publisher Datamost borrowed their marketing approach.  Although Datamost's fictional gamer is considerably older, and looks like he may actually be mentally unstable:

Nowadays, I play games to relax.  Maybe I'm doing it wrong.