Evan Ratliff

And the conclusion across the board was that young children cannot, they are cognitively unable to understand the intent of selling ads.

Hot dog.

That's what I would have said.

Hot dog.

They can't distinguish that from reality.

It was a whole new deal, though, because even when I played Atari, like we played for hours at a time.

Right, like if you dress up a cartoon as an ad, the kid just thinks it's a cartoon, or she does.

But I don't know.

You played a game for 30, 45 minutes and you pop in another.

Exactly, or if the ad is a cartoon rather than the kid doesn't know, they just think, I'm still watching cartoons on my TV.

And that's why you have like 40 games in your in your controller box, because none of them you could play for hours and hours and hours in a row and not eventually be like, OK, this is getting a little bit old, even as a kid.

My brain hasn't made that switch, but man, could I go for some Smurf cereal.

Yeah, so the gameplay was just light years ahead of anything.

Exactly.

So it was a big deal at the time.

So there were all these recommendations basically on how to regulate and restrict advertising that they basically said was unfair and deceptive to kids.

Almost every single source that I've seen on the Internet that talks about how Super Mario Bros.

changed things uses the word light years ahead of everything else because it really was.

For older kids, they said they can tell the difference, but maybe we should have warnings on the ads and disclosures saying that this is a commercial message.

There was a guy named Shigeru Miyamoto.