So, I was reading the NES page on Wikipedia, and it was interesting to find out some of the more subtle marketing tricks Nintendo used when first releasing the system. This may be common knowledge, but it was stuff I hadn't noticed before. Most of their marketing was in reaction to the video game crash of 1983, one issue being that game cover art was wildly exaggerated in comparison to wat the game actually was like. A good example of that is Centipede on the Atari 2600, the artwork is very realistic, and even has a comic book to go with it. When in reality it was just a shooter.
But with the original 30 black box games they used artwork that looked like what the game looked like, in order to not deter customers into thinking they were being hoodwinked again. So even the simple pixeled art on the covers of games like SMB or Excitebike had a purpose in mind. That, I found interesting.
The other thing was Nintendo's Seal of Quality which was used to ensure skeptical customers that the game was decent. Even tho that was still a sliding scale obviously as some games were just crap anyway. But even putting the games into certain genres on the boxes like "sports" or "action" was also a marketing trick to keep from alienating the customers.
Idk if that was old news to most people, but I read it today, found it interesting.