Flyers and Handouts from Winter CES 1990

As a follow-up to the Winter CES 1990 photo gallery I posted last week, I thought it would be fun to look at a few of the flyers convention-goers were given at the show. These were all generously scanned for me by Digital Press forums user thekeepr, who attended the show and managed to hold on to these in a safe place for the last twenty years.

These flyers were mainly used to promote excitement among the retailers attending the show, so that they would sell these titles in their shops. These were also given to the media for press coverage, and it's not uncommon to find screenshots scanned from these flyers in magazines of the time.

This first flyer shows Acclaim's lineup for the first half of 1990, most of which was kind of bad. If you think otherwise, you are probably blinded by nostalgia. What makes this particular lineup interesting to me is that a lot of these games were used in the oft-forgotten Video Power cartoon series, which premiered the previous September. I've never seen the show, but apparently it's about a group of Acclaim characters, including one of the cops from Narc, a Bigfoot truck, a random basketball player from Arch Rivals and, yes, Kwirk the way hip tomato with 'tude - going on crazy adventures together.

Every year I go to Comic-Con hoping the bootleg DVD guys are selling this show, and every year I walk away empty-handed.

"At last, Bandai debuts the most successfully re-run television show in history for the first time on the Nintendo screen." Boy, it's about time Bandai. Yes, this game is real, believe it or not. I've even played it to the end, though I was unable to beat the final boss which, if memory serves was an undead skeleton warrior thing. Just like on the last episode of the show.

This two-sided ad from Asmik is for the game Cosmic Epsilon, which is a kinda-sorta impressive Space Harrier clone. This game was never released outside of Japan, this flyer is for the unreleased U.S. localization.

This is Phantom Fighter. He fights phantoms, and tastes refreshingly of banana.

Solstice is a port of a British computer game, which made its debut at this particular CES. Note the back of the flyer, which proudly proclaims that Solstice was awarded a score of 30+ "by Nintendo's leading game experts." I have no idea what this means, is this a score Nintendo gave its third party publishers when determining if a game would be manufactured and sold? It's kind of interesting how this score is blatantly slapped on the flyer in huge text, as if its indended audience would know exactly what it meant.

Here is Monster Truck Rodeo, from Matchbox. This game was never released and, as far as I know, has never even been seen in playable form. There are screenshots on the bottom of the flyer, but I'm not convinced these are possible on the NES. These look like artist mock-ups to me.

Here is Web World, another unreleased Matchbox game. Matchbox's short-lived NES publishing adventure is an interesting bit of trivia; out of a total of eleven announced games, only one - Motor City Patrol - was ever released. One of my New Year's resolutions is to find someone who worked at Matchbox at the time and can explain what the hell happened. Yes, that's right, while you suckers are losing weight and quitting smoking I'm going to talk to toymakers about the 1990s.

Finally, to end this on a less obscure note, here is Tecmo's flyer for Ninja Gaiden II. You'll have to click through and look at the full-sized version to see what this really looks like, I am a big fan of the clean photograph taken from a monitor. Those pixels look good.