Crazy Comic Ads – Win prizes by playing a video game over a 1-900 number using your touch tone keypad

Today’s Crazy Comic Ad comes to us from the heyday of Marvel Comics, October 1991, from issue 3 of the official Terminator 2: Judgement Day comic book adaptation. And it’s a real doozy. Be sure to check it out full size to really get the effect of the craziness.

I remember this from back in my comic reading days, but even then it was before my time and I never got to actually participate in this odd “game”. I’m sure you hear “play games over the phone” and you think “What, you mean like over a modem?” No, I mean literally using your phone keypad to control the game action while you listen. From what I can ascertain from the ad, you apparently called in, and there would be audio cues you needed to listen for to press the “*”key, then you had a certain time limit in which you had to press a certain number which corresponded to a different X-Man using a different power based on the situation in the “game”. If you pressed outside the time limit, it was a missed shot and you did no damage. But the time intervals were also very weird. It wasn’t just “Press 3 in less than 3 seconds for Iceman”, it was also “Only press 4 for Banshee after 4 seconds but before 6 seconds”. So I guess you could compare it to trying to jump on top of a flying Koopa Troopa to make a difficult jump, but you can’t actually see anything, someone is describing all the action to you verbally as you move along the stage.

Nowadays this whole thing sounds absurd. Playing games with your phone means just that. I use my phone as a controller, and I fling birds across the screen or tilt the phone to steer my car or whatever, and I see the action right on the screen. To quote Elijah Wood in Back to the Future II, “You mean you have to use your hands? That’s like a baby’s toy!” This whole thing is compounded by what phones were like back in the early 90’s. You basically had two options. The wall phone in the kitchen was like a pay phone (Anyone remember what those are? For you young kids, they used to have phones you could pay to use out in public places back before everyone had a cell phone in their pocket), or the desk phone, where the numbers were part of the handset. And speaker phone wasn’t really a thing until the late 90’s, so I just keep picturing little kids failing miserably at this because they have to keep pulling the phone from their ear when they hear the cue and not being able to push the button in time, in addition to kid’s skewed sense of just how long 3 seconds actually is.

Your two choices of phone in the early 90’s.

And here’s the evil genius behind this whole game. I’ll touch on the whole 1-900 thing in another planned article in the future, but the game was designed to fail just after a minute if you couldn’t get the button presses timed right. So that meant you had to call back and try again, all at the higher first minute price until you could get it right. If you managed to get past the first stage, you were then asked X-Men trivia questions, and then if you got enough right, you were given a code, which you then had to mail in a damn postcard (a non electronic mail for the youngsters) to Marvel to claim the prize. But the kicker here is Marvel reserved the right to limit you to four calls a week. If you called more often, you didn’t get the prize. They would of course keep the money for the calls, but then they got to double dip by keeping the prizes. I’m sure there were plenty of kids who really wanted those posters, who called endlessly over and over, practicing until they got it right, and then who were devastated when they never got their prize. And who then got their asses beat by their parents for running up huge phone bills. $1.75 in 1991 money is like $9.99 in 2012 money.

I think Louie CK puts it most succinctly when it comes to the evolution of the phone.

 
So did you actually get to play this back in the day? If so, I’d love to hear more about the actual dynamics of it, and if you did actually get your poster, so let me hear all about it in the comments!
 

Update

So apparently this was not a one time thing. During my weekly comic shop run today, I picked up a bunch of older quarter books, which included Hell’s Angel #5, from November 1992, and it looks like Marvel ran a very similar thing again a year later, this time using Ghost Rider instead of the X-men

JohnScott is the proud owner of a life size replica Captain Kirk Chair. He is a hoarder of Comic Books, Transformers, and Star Trek action figures. He attended Space Camp as an adult. He has taken vacations to the closing of the Star Trek Experience and the final night Shuttle launch. He has been known to yell at his television when the kids can't put together the damn statue in the Shrine of the Silver Monkey. When not writing for InsufficientScotty, he is a Software Engineer for a major healthcare communications company. You can Email or follow on Twitter @NotEnoughScotty or Facebook