The Sega 32X Had the Greatest Infomercial Ever
When the holiday season of 1994 was coming up and Sega wanted to get people talking about the 32X, it decided to forego the WELCOME TO THE NEXT LEVEL marketing campaign that made the Genesis so popular and do something else, namely create a 30 minute late night infomercial disguised as a scripted teen drama/comedy show that would only air a couple of times over the course of a month or so.
Prior to the debut of the infomercial, titled Absolutely Rose Street, Sega used its own magazine, Sega Visions, to generate some hype about the show. “Sega Goes Hollywood With a New TV Show” the magazine read. Not only that, but Billboard Magazine ran an article about the show while it was in production.
Time has proven that this strategy was an unsuccessful one considering the Sega 32X is universally considered to be a commercial failure. Despite this, Absolutely Rose Street is a fascinating and hilarious piece of gaming history. So how did the Sega 32X stack up against late night juggernauts like Tony Little and Ron Popeil? Let’s look at a few reasons why this is perhaps the greatest infomercial ever made.
It is an infomercial disguised as a scripted TV series
Just in case the constant product placement isn’t obvious enough.
Even though the opening seconds of the program indicate that “the following is a paid advertisement by Sega of America,” the rest of the show makes no attempt to disclose this fact to you. Absolutely Rose Street has an opening segment with a theme song, a title screen and the program itself has built in commercial breaks (more on those later).
From there it feels as if you are watching a pilot to a television program and not your usual infomercial. There are characters and an episode-long plot. There are no breaks in the program to flash a 1–800 number at you for you to order the product they are advertising. This was done by design, as an interview with then-product manager Peter Loeb indicates. He says that the program is “context advertising” and is an attempt to “show how Sega product fits into the context of people’s lives” in his interview with Billboard. The idea was that young people who were up at 3 AM watching TV during Thanksgiving and Christmas break would see a show about people their age and opt to watch that as opposed to a Susan Powter infomercial.
It has an insane story
The early 90s in picture form.
So what was Absolutely Rose Street about, anyway? The short version is that it is part Wayne’s World and part Degrassi with nearly every moment dedicated to tricking you into buying something that will be obsolete in a year.
Video Game Ephemera, the ones who uncovered this long-lost piece of history and released it on the internet, say this program is about “Game Beat, a cable TV show hosted by Christina Savage and her hotheaded sort-of boyfriend Max Jackson. As the story begins, the station manager is screening an episode of Game Beat for producer Joe Whitehead. He asks Joe to take charge of the show and polish it up to please a potential sponsor. But Joe has other plans: He wants to cancel Game Beat and give its time slot to Styling With Stella, a show about fashion tips hosted by Joe’s girlfriend, Stella Lightwood.” Of course from there, hijinks ensue.
The show’s crew stumbles around, wondering if they will find that one product to give their show energy and save it from being canceled. While scrambling for ideas, the female lead says that she hears rumors of Doom, the “biggest story in gaming,” coming to the Sega 32X. Max clarifies that the 32X is a “turbo charger” for your Sega Genesis.
Of course, the 32X is just the thing to bring their show from the brink of cancellation, the villainous producer fails and his girlfriend actress leaves him. The story ends with the producer falling to his knees and shouting “Segaaaaaaaa!!” while his love interest gets in a car to leave.
Damn you, games journalism!
Not only does this show have a full cast of fictional characters, but a few real game designers make cameos as well! Sam Nicholson of Tomcat Alley and Midnight Raiders fame, as well as American McGee (American McGee’s Alice and Scrapland) show up to give “interviews” to the cast of Game Beat.
Commercial breaks within the infomercial
The Sega Genesis was the Voltron of game consoles.
Infomercials themselves are long commercials for a product, but this one took that concept to another level entirely. As previously stated, the show presents itself as a scripted television program with characters and a story, but to further emphasize the point that this was a “TV show” and not an infomercial, the show had built in commercial breaks! If you wanted to, you could probably make the case that Absolutely Rose Street is the Inception of commercials.
There were two types of ads used during these commercial breaks; Sega product commercials and public service announcements. First we will look at the Sega commercials!
There are a total of three commercials within this show that are designed around pushing the Sega hardware. One of them takes place in a morgue where a young man is called in to identify a body, one that is supposed to embody the Super NES (Sega’s primary competition at the time if you are unaware). They make jokes about it being “dead” because it doesn’t have things like the Sega CD and 32X. Everyone knows what it takes to make a hip console in 1994, $500 in extra hardware!
Does the cast of Game Beat enter the Infomercial Hall of Fame? Do you even need to ask?
In addition, there are three public service announcements sprinkled throughout the show. One of the first ads is one of the most memorable PSAs from the 1990s for me. It features a kid on a basketball court being approached by a drug dealer asking what he needs. The kid then proceeds to tell him about all the things a kid needs to be doing instead of doing drugs. The drug dealer walks away in disgust.
The last PSA I want to talk about is my favorite of the bunch, an entry from the Crash Test Dummies ad campaign! These commercials would always feature the dummies destroying cars in dramatic fashion and telling the viewer (often while their bodies were mangled from the accident) “Don’t be a dummy, buckle your safety belt!”
That doesn’t even include the near constant references to Sega products and games throughout the show’s story in some form or another. From Virtua Racing to Doom to Sonic 3 and Knuckles, you were almost constantly being reminded of something in Sega’s arsenal.
“Don’t be a dummy, buy the Incredible Crash Dummies for Sega Genesis!”
Was this advertising campaign a success? Well, the 32X was only able to sell around 665,000 units globally (compared to the 30+ million Genesis units sold). To make matters worse, the Sega Saturn launched in the US only six months after the 32X. Trying to sell people an expensive new console on top of an over-priced, underutilized peripheral for your dated console likely wasn’t the best strategy. Even though Absolutely Rose Street failed in its effort to make the 32X a hit, it is hard to deny that this was a pretty unique and creative marketing campaign.
To close out the piece in Billboard Magazine, the author notes that if there was a demand for it, more episodes of Absolutely Rose Street could’ve been ordered. I think it’s safe to say that insomniacs in 1994 were more interested in buying a Gazelle.
