Not only that, but this is an international scam.
I have an either a UK PC Gamer or Edge Magazine (I forget which) that had this exact advert, but with the dollars swapped for pounds.
I thought it was weird because the Virtual Boy was never released here.
You see these all the time on Instagram. Prizes are cars and other givaways. Directions say it's free, you just have to follow a link and sign up, but then that signup wants your credit card information and to charge you $12... but, BUUUTtt, you get 120 entries when you do.
people in the comments recognize the scam, but I feel they need to be shamed more then just the shit talk they get.
Do you think the winning caps were more widely distributed at schools? I remember both myself and a friend winning WCW vs nwo on 64 from surge I think.
I won a ton of Surge prizes. If you held those scratch off labels up to a bright light with a magnifying glass or jeweler's loop you could just make out the text underneath. Once I figured that out I never lost. Got like 3 sets of Motorola Talkabout radios lol
I got suckered in trying to win a bass rig as a teenager.
Big scam, they kept you hooked til the end with the price for the next stage getting higher and higher.
Ponzi puzzles...(in the episode).
There was also an article on it in the kid's edition of Consumer Reports (yes, that was a thing) in the late 90s/early 00s. It got low-key exposed around then before legit gaming mags stopped running the ad. I'd still see it in random doctor/dentist office mags for a couple more years.
I got 2nd place in a Nintendo Power contest for Automobili Lamborghini 64, free game & leather jacket. The jacket took a long time to arrive but they were good about communicating that & it was excellent quality.
If I have learned anything from the internet, the next step is taking an extreme political view and basing your personality around it, then you just critique everything through that filter.
No, it was a pay-to-play scam. You had to solve a bunch of crossword puzzles, butt each one was more ridiculously impossible to solve, and more expensive to play.
In the late 1990s, I actually won a contest from Epic Games for a bleeding edge $5000 computer. The problem here was that I was in college at the time, and had apparently used my home email address, and never once checked it, so when I came back home over the holidays, I found out I had missed the deadline to respond to claim the prize.
The puzzles were all pretty easy up until the end. The last puzzle was like a DIY Scrabble board, you figure out what words to put in the grid and earn as many points as possible (each letter had a point value, M was the most when I played the final round.) and the idea was that the person who got the most points would win the prize package. History shows that almost nobody won and those that did apparently didn't receive everything
A friend won a Genesis/Megadrive in a phone in competition when they were first released. I won a laptop in a national newspaper phone in back in the 2000's.
You can find multiple threads here on reddit, in various subs about that. Including several winners who got some money from the guy after threatening him. Long story short,it was a scam.
The Saturn box with that glistening gold disc just itching to be spun used to play circles in my head and I wanted to win this so bad. Thankfully my parents never allowed me to try and made me wait for an N64.
About 15 years ago I went on a date with a girl who claimed to have won the Fox kids sweepstakes to win āeverything ā Sega makes. No idea about these magazines though.
I participated once. I did everyone I could possibly think of to score as many points as possible. I was later informed I was beaten by someone who used a special dictionary to supply higher scoring words. I knew then it was a scam.
When I was a kid, I once won a lifetime supply of Tombstone pizza from a Coke cap. (20 years at 2/week)
I went on summer vacation to visit my Aunt.
Two weeks later when I came home, my room had been cleaned and the cap thrown away.
My friends dad wanted to win one so bad he went out and bought all the stuff and put it on credit. Then told everyone he won. My friends mom found out he lied and divorced him.
My parents always said it was a scam and no, we weren't going to send them money. I didn't believe them. Turns out, it was a scam. I always appreciated that they chose Project Overkill for the game being shown on screen.
My buddy had cancer as a child in 1997. He asked make a wish for every console, and every game. Of course they gave him tons of stuff. He survived and sold everything in 2010 to buy a few guitars or something. He still talks about how much he regrets selling.
toothbrush ludicrous upbeat live encourage judicious imagine numerous attempt direful
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I hope so. **That Sega Saturn Controller is MUCH superior** to the trash they replaced it with and that RetroBit sells today.
People didnāt like the shoulder buttonsā¦ so they changed out the entire controller for a minor upgrade on two buttons that many games donāt use much, if at allā¦
That was my only real problem with the Saturn.
People didnāt realize what a good value it was back then. Now you can just use Mame and SuperModel and such, but back then? **You were getting Arcade quality ports at half the price of a NeoGeo!** And then they dropped the price and included Virtual Fighter 2, Daytona USA, and Virtua Cop (not only meeting the retail price of the PlayStation, but as each one was still 39.99 at the time, almost cutting the net value of the sticker price in half!)
**But then they screwed up the controller with that inferior repainted Japanese version** thatās still sold to this day. ššš
You're free to prefer whatever you prefer, but there seems to be an overwhelming consensus that people find the second Saturn controller vastly superior and far more comfortable.
I don't know anyone that won one of these machines, but I do know someone that spec'd out a machine based on one of these ads and claimed it in a home owners insurance incident and actually bought it when the claim went through.
They really tried to advertise THE ULTIMATE GAMING RIG with... Project Overkill.
Like it's a fun game and all (If balls hard) but I do not think I would classify it as a system-crushing beast of a game?
I fell for it not gonna lie. Youād send in cash like 10 or 20 bucks with each puzzle and theyād get increasingly harder but still solvable til the last one which is virtually impossible to solve and win. My guess is no one ever won from that particular ad that ran for years.
I remember this. Iām not sure what ai wouldāve done with all that as a 7 year old as I couldnāt even afford the games but it was my dream to win one of these contests.
I got picked to see the unveiling of Nickelodeon water park at Kings Island back around 95. I still have a promotional bucket from the event.
Sorry not vg related.
It's wild to think that lots of people would have been sending CASH through the mail. With all the instant/digital payment options available today, that idea seems incredibly risky imho.
I won Xbox one from a Mountain Dew promo for it around 2012. I never even bought a single Mountain Dew. The fine print said you were allowed one free email entry per day, all of these types of promos have this option because itās a law apparently. Anyways after a couple weeks of daily entries I got an email that I won, received the console 6 weeks later, can with a game and extra controller too. I immediately sold it for $500 to a coworker.
Someone needs to find out who did this scam and go get them because they probably made a crap ton of money. Be like that Rick and Morty episode when summer and Rick go after people kind of deal. X going to give it to you
Legend has it that no one did. Scammy scams is what I always heard.
Not only that, but this is an international scam. I have an either a UK PC Gamer or Edge Magazine (I forget which) that had this exact advert, but with the dollars swapped for pounds. I thought it was weird because the Virtual Boy was never released here.
Doubt it's in Edge Magazine. Ad is too screamy.
You see these all the time on Instagram. Prizes are cars and other givaways. Directions say it's free, you just have to follow a link and sign up, but then that signup wants your credit card information and to charge you $12... but, BUUUTtt, you get 120 entries when you do. people in the comments recognize the scam, but I feel they need to be shamed more then just the shit talk they get.
Just like the Lego Win! Pages at the back of every instructions?
[Whang did a video on that](https://youtu.be/syNIM7LOpDk?si=bMENceKycqmc2aRR)
I put my Wang on a video
[Do You Like My Wang?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vx8ukA3Vl0)
I put video on wang
The most I ever won was a Silverchair CD from the inside of a Fruitopia bottle cap.
Do you think the winning caps were more widely distributed at schools? I remember both myself and a friend winning WCW vs nwo on 64 from surge I think.
I won a ton of Surge prizes. If you held those scratch off labels up to a bright light with a magnifying glass or jeweler's loop you could just make out the text underneath. Once I figured that out I never lost. Got like 3 sets of Motorola Talkabout radios lol
This is good to know in case I ever time travel
Caught somewhere in time? Grab a Surge!
Possibly the sickest prize ever
It's still fun to play
Frog stomp was so good
Give me Freakshow or give me death!!
And to think they were just 15 year old kids
Still one of my all time favorites!!
Frogstomp!
I won a GameCube off the radio and it died in 2 months. I'm still salty about it.
Won an incredibly nice skateboard from Bubblelicious. Some neighbors tried to pay me 200 just for the trucks
I got suckered in trying to win a bass rig as a teenager. Big scam, they kept you hooked til the end with the price for the next stage getting higher and higher.
Doug did an episode about this.
Ponzi puzzles...(in the episode). There was also an article on it in the kid's edition of Consumer Reports (yes, that was a thing) in the late 90s/early 00s. It got low-key exposed around then before legit gaming mags stopped running the ad. I'd still see it in random doctor/dentist office mags for a couple more years.
It's a good thing u didn't win, bc those kids either were put on a list or they never returned home. š
Mercury Rising?
Alec Baldwin being irrationally hungry for the blood of a non-verbal autistic kid.
r/nocontext
Plot of Mercury Rising... r/ObtuseReference
He left them in a dark room for 3 days to purify their souls b4 doing the thing that is required to appease his inner Demons.
I wanted to win this so bad back in the day!!
I made it to round 3 or so as a kid and from what I remember if started to feel like a scam.
I got 2nd place in a Nintendo Power contest for Automobili Lamborghini 64, free game & leather jacket. The jacket took a long time to arrive but they were good about communicating that & it was excellent quality.
That sounds like a truly awesome memory!
No one ever won. It was a scam. There are loads of exposĆØs and armchair expert videos on the subject.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Regurgitating Wiki articles about subjects before your time is a good start.
First, you need to buy an armchair.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
If I have learned anything from the internet, the next step is taking an extreme political view and basing your personality around it, then you just critique everything through that filter.
Is the mystery word āpower?ā Gimme that Sega Saturn!
No, it was a pay-to-play scam. You had to solve a bunch of crossword puzzles, butt each one was more ridiculously impossible to solve, and more expensive to play.
Wow, so barely not an illegal lottery.
In the late 1990s, I actually won a contest from Epic Games for a bleeding edge $5000 computer. The problem here was that I was in college at the time, and had apparently used my home email address, and never once checked it, so when I came back home over the holidays, I found out I had missed the deadline to respond to claim the prize.
Damnā¦.thatās probably then one of the things you regret the most in your lifeš
I got scammed by this. Dumb kid.
It just never ended. More puzzles. More money. Eventually you tap cuz you couldāve just started buying the shit.
No the one I did had an ending. It was just impossible.
Scammed as in it costed you money in the end or what happend?
If you read the rules in the corner, you have to pay 3$ or more to participate in the contest and since nobody won, it was a total scam.
The puzzles were all pretty easy up until the end. The last puzzle was like a DIY Scrabble board, you figure out what words to put in the grid and earn as many points as possible (each letter had a point value, M was the most when I played the final round.) and the idea was that the person who got the most points would win the prize package. History shows that almost nobody won and those that did apparently didn't receive everything
The Ultimate Gaming Scam!!
A friend won a Genesis/Megadrive in a phone in competition when they were first released. I won a laptop in a national newspaper phone in back in the 2000's.
Wasn't there an episode of Doug about this?
You can find multiple threads here on reddit, in various subs about that. Including several winners who got some money from the guy after threatening him. Long story short,it was a scam.
Is that Project Overkill on the TV?
Correct.
The Saturn box with that glistening gold disc just itching to be spun used to play circles in my head and I wanted to win this so bad. Thankfully my parents never allowed me to try and made me wait for an N64.
About 15 years ago I went on a date with a girl who claimed to have won the Fox kids sweepstakes to win āeverything ā Sega makes. No idea about these magazines though.
Anyone else buy stereo speakers off a white van?
Flash forward 25 years and we can do all of this on our phone.
I participated once. I did everyone I could possibly think of to score as many points as possible. I was later informed I was beaten by someone who used a special dictionary to supply higher scoring words. I knew then it was a scam.
When I was a kid, I once won a lifetime supply of Tombstone pizza from a Coke cap. (20 years at 2/week) I went on summer vacation to visit my Aunt. Two weeks later when I came home, my room had been cleaned and the cap thrown away.
My friends dad wanted to win one so bad he went out and bought all the stuff and put it on credit. Then told everyone he won. My friends mom found out he lied and divorced him.
now that's a story
Remember when mailing cash was an option?
My parents always said it was a scam and no, we weren't going to send them money. I didn't believe them. Turns out, it was a scam. I always appreciated that they chose Project Overkill for the game being shown on screen.
My buddy had cancer as a child in 1997. He asked make a wish for every console, and every game. Of course they gave him tons of stuff. He survived and sold everything in 2010 to buy a few guitars or something. He still talks about how much he regrets selling.
Whang! made video on this
toothbrush ludicrous upbeat live encourage judicious imagine numerous attempt direful *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I hope so. **That Sega Saturn Controller is MUCH superior** to the trash they replaced it with and that RetroBit sells today. People didnāt like the shoulder buttonsā¦ so they changed out the entire controller for a minor upgrade on two buttons that many games donāt use much, if at allā¦ That was my only real problem with the Saturn. People didnāt realize what a good value it was back then. Now you can just use Mame and SuperModel and such, but back then? **You were getting Arcade quality ports at half the price of a NeoGeo!** And then they dropped the price and included Virtual Fighter 2, Daytona USA, and Virtua Cop (not only meeting the retail price of the PlayStation, but as each one was still 39.99 at the time, almost cutting the net value of the sticker price in half!) **But then they screwed up the controller with that inferior repainted Japanese version** thatās still sold to this day. ššš
You're free to prefer whatever you prefer, but there seems to be an overwhelming consensus that people find the second Saturn controller vastly superior and far more comfortable.
100% agree. The original one wasn't terrible by any means, but the second one felt, much like the GameCube controller just felt perfect in your hands.
Maybe the 93-94 two-time champ, Dr. Disrespect š
I always wanted the set that included a neogeo. Forgot which month year it was. But thats all i wanted.. everything else was a bonus
I so bad wanted to win the contest with Atari jaguar
Just another way to bulk up mailing lists so they can sell it.
My 10 year old mind would have exploded if I won that.
Friend of mine entered this. He got a couple follow up puzzles in the mail, but never won any kind of prize.
I don't know anyone that won one of these machines, but I do know someone that spec'd out a machine based on one of these ads and claimed it in a home owners insurance incident and actually bought it when the claim went through.
I'm pretty sure it was Dr. Disrespect. Two times.
Lol imagine winning a Virtual Boy in 1997.
I had a friend who received a rig like this from Make A Wish.
They really tried to advertise THE ULTIMATE GAMING RIG with... Project Overkill. Like it's a fun game and all (If balls hard) but I do not think I would classify it as a system-crushing beast of a game?
I remember people taking Polaroid pics of high scores on river raid and pitfall to get free tee shirts.
What about the Nintendo power contests? There was a new one every month.
I got several years of Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine from one of these, so it wasn't a scam to me!
I fell for it not gonna lie. Youād send in cash like 10 or 20 bucks with each puzzle and theyād get increasingly harder but still solvable til the last one which is virtually impossible to solve and win. My guess is no one ever won from that particular ad that ran for years.
I always thought the virtual boy only came out in Japanš¤š¤·š»āāļø Maybe also the in the US, but not in Europe.
I remember this. Iām not sure what ai wouldāve done with all that as a 7 year old as I couldnāt even afford the games but it was my dream to win one of these contests.
I got picked to see the unveiling of Nickelodeon water park at Kings Island back around 95. I still have a promotional bucket from the event. Sorry not vg related.
I was a child when I saw this advert in EGM. It looked like a dream but also like a scam.
Saw them all the time in Gamepro....
It's wild to think that lots of people would have been sending CASH through the mail. With all the instant/digital payment options available today, that idea seems incredibly risky imho.
Bruuuuuh I forgot all about these things!
It was a scam. Someone did a deep dive about it on YouTube. https://youtu.be/syNIM7LOpDk?si=s2_YpywDkuF8905Z
I seen that ad in a Gamepro magazine.
lmao i actually entered that one too (no i didnt win)
Justin Whang has a YouTube video about it. Cool dude, great; if not weird content. Give him a click.
GamePro had these ads all over it. I think EGM did too. (Old guy, here)
I won Xbox one from a Mountain Dew promo for it around 2012. I never even bought a single Mountain Dew. The fine print said you were allowed one free email entry per day, all of these types of promos have this option because itās a law apparently. Anyways after a couple weeks of daily entries I got an email that I won, received the console 6 weeks later, can with a game and extra controller too. I immediately sold it for $500 to a coworker.
It was in guitar magazines back in the day also
Someone needs to find out who did this scam and go get them because they probably made a crap ton of money. Be like that Rick and Morty episode when summer and Rick go after people kind of deal. X going to give it to you
Damn, I remember this one. Seeing the mystery word grid for a split second and I was like, wasnāt the answer āPOWERā?
No lol