Back in 1983, Sega released Congo Bongo in arcades as Sega’s isometric answer to Donkey Kong. The game had you playing a man on safari chasing a giant gorilla through several levels. However, due to the isometric nature of the game, it made it very challenging. The game was soon released on all popular gaming platforms of the early to mid 80’s so of course, a commercial was made to sell the game. The comedian you hear in the ad is the very famous Henny Youngman who made a career out of zippy one liners such as “Take my wife…please!” and is a much funnier comedian than what’s shown in this commercial. Continue reading for an example of his better stuff.
The game animation shown is complete BS. These high quality graphics are nonexistent in any version of the game. It looks so much cleaner and nicer than even the arcade version can provide. You want proof? Look at the comparison video of all the other versions down below (Surprisingly, the SG 1000 version looks the least like the arcade version, going for a 2-D look instead). Close, but still very false advertising for back in the day. In fact, the only arcade perfect version you can find in the U.S. is on the Ultimate Genesis collection for PSP/PS3 as an unlockable although there were other versions of Congo Bongo released in Japan.
Ad:
It’s interesting that the commercial is animated rather than showing actual footage. But not entirely unheard of in that era of gaming. Gaming magazines in those days would regularly run illustrations of games rather than screenshots. Nowadays we have all sorts of easy methods for screen captures. Back then, a lot of that technology either didn’t exist yet, or wasn’t affordable yet to the small-scale operations that took a chance on covering games. In this case, I would guess it was a preference of the director in order to get the close-up shots they used.
It was all fun and games, and they had to find a way to sell it. I would rather prefer a girl being saved, but a guy walking thru the jungle with a famous comedian, is also good. It looks like if they did a stop motion?