Nerd Rush: The Legend of Zelda's horrible (and not so horrible) advertising schemes, part 2.

And we're back. I left you last week in 1993, at the beginning of the great wide gulf of nothing that Nintendo didn't fill again with Zelda goodness until 1998.

Somewhere in between there, gaming changed. Sega, who had been neck-and-neck with Nintendo in the console wars, was suddenly slipping far behind. Their console, the Saturn, hadn't done as well as predicted. Out of nowhere, Sony entered the race with their new, fancy CD-ROM console - the Playstation. Nintendo matched their competitors with a shiny new 64-bit console, dubbed (appropriately) the Nintendo 64, or N64 for short.

The competition was ferocious, and as a result, all the companies stepped up their advertising budgets. Ocarina of Time was the new, hotly anticipated (and very delayed) Zelda game, and it got a lot of commercials.

Here's a couple Japanese ones:

Summary: Girls like Zelda. If you like Zelda, girls will like you, and you can make funny noises together! This may also be an early attempt to capture the female gamer market, but somehow I doubt it.

Here's the North American one, which is actually not bad:

Apparently they fired the guy who did the previous ones, which is probably good.

But the most interesting thing I have to show you from Ocarina of Time is this French promo commercial of the Ocarina of Time beta. It was known only as Zelda 64 at the time, and as you can see the end result was pretty different:

I also want to share a commercial for a drink that Link featured in as an early example of video game cross-promotion outside of Japan:

The drink is called Mirinda, and it's from Mexico. Link's a mega sellout.

That's all for this time, folks, I'll be back later with some extra creepy commercials from Majora's Mask!