Before gaming became a mainstream spectacle, before cinematic trailers and branded energy drinks, there was a transmission: strange, glitching, and disturbingly human. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, PlayStation’s advertising strategy wasn’t just subversive, it was unsettling. The ads didn’t sell games, they sold the feeling of being inside one. Or worse, the suspicion that you might already be.
PlayStation didn’t arrive to play by the rules. It arrived to rewrite them. While Sega sold speed and Nintendo sold innocence, Sony’s console leaned into the uncanny, the digital sublime, and the post-human. This wasn’t a toy, it was an interface with another world. Nowhere was this clearer than in a series of ads that broke away from the logic of traditional marketing. These were closer to experimental short films than commercials, sometimes filmed in low-res or black and white, with a lo-fi, psychotropic aesthetic that echoed MTV’s early visual language and Chris Cunningham’s body-horror dreamworlds.
The most iconic, and perhaps the most haunting, of these campaigns featured a girl with a face subtly distorted by CGI, her features altered just enough to be unsettling, yet still human. Her hair was real, her eyes wide, but her voice—carrying the soft lilt of an Irish accent—felt at once familiar and alien. In the Mental Wealth ad, she spoke not in eerie warnings but in something closer to an eerie, almost prophetic assertion about the nature of reality, self, and identity. She wasn’t just a character—she was an embodiment of the tension between digital and physical existence, asking us to question the value we place on our own mental well-being in a world increasingly shaped by the virtual.
The PlayStation girl wasn’t merely a figure in an advertisement, she was a symbol. In 1999, Dazed & Confused magazine put her, her digitally altered but undeniably human face, on its cover, pushing her beyond the confines of gaming culture and into the realm of fashion and broader cultural consciousness. The ad’s chilling mixture of technology and intimacy helped her transcend her origins, making her one of the first avatars to occupy the space between digital fantasy and cultural iconography.
Years later, The Fourth Sex: Adolescent Extremes—the cult-favorite catalogue from Raf Simons and Francesco Bonami’s 2003 exhibition in Florence—would canonize this moment. Among pages filled with teen bedrooms, digital subcultures, and radical fashion imagery, the PlayStation girl appeared once again, frozen in that same ethereal gaze. Her inclusion wasn’t ironic, it was spot-on. She was a symptom and a symbol of something the book sought to explore: the erosion of physical identity and the rise of a new, digital adolescence. In The Fourth Sex, she wasn’t just an ad, she was a mirror.
But the alien girl wasn’t the only messenger in this era of strange transmissions. There were others—veins, eyes, and images that would make any brand safety officer recoil in horror. Ads flooded the market with visual metaphors of addiction, obsession, and disintegration. One showed bloodshot eyes, with veins forming PlayStation symbols—a disconcerting reminder that these games were not just entertainment. They were a digital drug, coursing through the bloodstream like a second heart. Another ad took the same idea further, showing veins erupting from a player’s arms as if PlayStation’s power was leaking into their very skin, consuming them, changing them. The boundary between player and game was gone. It wasn’t about playing the game, it was about becoming it.
And then came the images that ventured into a more unsettling territory: PlayStation-branded condoms. An ad with the tagline “Be careful” placed them alongside the ever-present symbols of PlayStation, as if to suggest that the intimacy of gaming could be as dangerous, as unpredictable, as the physical world itself. The sexualized imagery didn’t end there. In another campaign, a man was shown holding a pair of panties to his face, deeply inhaling them as if the symbols stitched into the fabric were something sacred, or perhaps something beyond. The ad was a moment of discomfort, straddling the line between voyeurism and consumption. This wasn’t about selling a product. This was about selling the feeling of being exposed, consumed, and transformed.
These ads weren’t about gameplay, narratives, or characters. They weren’t even about selling a product in the traditional sense. PlayStation was selling something far more insidious—an experience, an immersion that blurred the lines between reality and simulation. They didn’t want you to buy a console, they wanted you to step into a new world, one that felt both hyperreal and grotesquely alien. PlayStation’s brand wasn’t just about games, it was about living within a new, unsettling interface, where the body, the mind, and the digital realm merged in strange, painful ways.
These early PlayStation campaigns now feel like artifacts from a different timeline—one where mass media still had teeth, and brands whispered in code. They were precursors to the identity-melting aesthetics we now call vaporwave, the eerie corporate hauntology that underpins late-capitalist nostalgia. But back then, they didn’t have a name. They just felt… off.
And maybe that was the point. PlayStation wasn’t selling a product. It was selling dislocation. An escape so complete it felt like abduction. A future already waiting for us.
