Strange request. Does anyone know where I can view the U.S. Chrono Trigger TV commercial? I have the Japanese one but not the U.S. one.
http://gameads.gamepressure.com/
Great site. I swear by it.
Strange request. Does anyone know where I can view the U.S. Chrono Trigger TV commercial? I have the Japanese one but not the U.S. one.
http://gameads.gamepressure.com/
Great site. I swear by it.
Did Chrono Trigger even have an American commercial? I remember seeing the Final Fantasy III one once when I was younger but never an ad for Chrono Trigger.
Tradegamesnow and GameTZ feedback.
There was definitely one. I remember it well enough. It was a pretty by the books commercial with scenes from the game popping up and this announcer with a strange accent yelling at you. CHRONO TREE-GGAAAA!!!!!!
This is one of the great, lost video game commercials. I remember it well.
"Lose your luggage". Sure, when I go through time, I expect to lose my samsonite.
Frickin' awesome.
I've been scouring the net for this particular piece of videogame nostalgia but have yet to turn up a single pixel. Bah!
Before the game was released, one of the Square guys posted the commercial air times on some message board (I think it was Dr. Gamewiz - anyone remember that?) IIRC, it only aired a few times on MTV in the early AM. That would explain its rarity.
And after typing the above, I just searched through Google Groups, it turns up a discussion from 1995 on it. Type "Chrono Trigger" MTV as the search phrase. They confirm this, and mention that it was in Japanese with subtitles, which I somewhat remember as well.
Hmmm...could the US commercial be the same as the Japanese one just with subtitles?
Nine year bump and for good reason.
The mystery is solved and is worth preserving!
Last edited by TonyTheTiger; 05-31-2017 at 11:15 PM.
My extremely limited Japanese makes me think that's a joke/fan-made video. I don't think those are even correct subtitles.
How is "Dream Project" anything even close to "Dig this."?
I do not recall ever seeing a Square SNES-era commercial on TV. Although the FF3 commercial people have said aired.
I do remember Square USA was a pretty small company then (who could only manage to put out a couple games a year) so I can't imagine they spent a whole lot on fairly-expensive TV advertising. Magazine advertising, yes, they did.
Huh. This is the first I've ever heard of a US SNES Chrono Trigger commercial. I definitely never saw one at the time. If it's real, it's very bizarre that they'd air a Japanese-language commercial on US TV. Even more bizarre because they didn't even translate what was being said. Calling them "subtitles" is giving them too much credit. It's just completely made up text. Most of what's said in Japanese is just them listing off the notable people working on the project. And at that point, you have to wonder why they left the Japanese voice track in at all. Would've made more sense to replace it with someone reading the English text, or heck, just let the music play and let us read.
I don't remember this existing either, but if you read all the comments from those who do, this weird video seems to be exactly what they all remember.
"Game programmers are generally lazy individuals. That's right. It's true. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Since the dawn of computer games, game programmers have looked for shortcuts to coolness." Kurt Arnlund - Game programmer for Activision, Accolade...
I guess what's funniest is that what I remember as being a "strange accent" was literally just Japanese.
And yeah, they're fake subs. What's being said is "Dream Project: Dragon Ball's Akira Toriyama, Dragon Quest's Yuji Horii, Final Fantasy's Hironobu Sakaguchi." They just hacked up a Japanese commercial (if you pause at exactly the right moment you can see the "Dream Project" image being covered up by the snow effect at the beginning and the "C" that would form the Chrono Trigger logo at the end), put some bogus subtitles, and called it a day.
I can't tell if it's stylistic choice or hilariously cheap. Squaresoft wasn't new to TV spots. They were already in the habit of producing fully animated commercials for American TV. They did it for Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy III, and Secret of Evermore. And if they wanted to make a commercial but didn't want to spend any money they could have used the same video and had some guy narrate the thing in English. The background music is straight from the game so it's not like it would have been hard to make a new audio track. It's like they deliberately left this in Japanese for shits and giggles.
I guess they downplayed the actual narration because Dragon Ball was still a few years away from taking off and Dragon Warrior wasn't the hot shit it was in Japan. But even the fake subs themselves are weird as hell. "It's like butter." Wut?
It supposedly aired on USA Network, which if true explains how I saw it. Around 1995 I was watching the cartoons on that channel like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Savage Dragon on Sunday mornings. It would have been a fairly inexpensive but appropriate time slot to air a game commercial.
Last edited by TonyTheTiger; 06-03-2017 at 03:03 PM.
I wonder if they got the "It's like butter" line from the SNL Coffee Talk sketches, haha.
It wouldn't surprise me if it were some weird reference like that. This was during Nintendo's Play It Loud era where their ads took a hard turn toward the bizarre and gross--weird shit like a lineup of painted tongues to sell Game Boys. The lunacy of airing a Japanese commercial with nonsense subtitles sounds more than plausible when placed in that context.
It's like they just decided that "those dumbass kids won't know or care what the moonspeak is really saying" and went for a combination of pop culture and straight absurdist humor. Now it needs a dramatic reading by William Shatner.
RPGs: Proof that one you start done the dork path, forever will it dominate your wallet's destiny.
I don't think there was ever a U.S. TV commercial for the game. They may have just relied on print ads for it.
I probably only ever saw it air once so it's rarity justifies it's obscurity to people but that video above is definitely the real deal. It fits what I remember seeing and even if my own memory is suspect (I didn't remember the subtitles, for example) there are enough corroborating accounts to confirm it for sure.
Check it out:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!to...do/cLNJfz7yS18
I'm just glad this is over. It was actually something of a long standing minor mission of mine to find this damn thing and the fact that nobody else knew what I was talking about made it kind of surreal. It was just so weird that such a popular game would have a piece of its history missing like that. If you notice, this was literally one of the first questions I asked after joining this site. Nice to have that monkey off my back.
Last edited by TonyTheTiger; 06-30-2017 at 02:11 AM.