I nearly fell out of my seat when I discovered this "accessory" in the back pages of a early 1990s issue of GamePro magazine. It's the Multi Game Hunter, a device that, well, allows you to illegally copy games onto a high capacity floppy disc. Okay, it also allows you to back-up your own games (which is what the commercial is suggesting you do), but there's nobody in this entire world that used the Multi Game Hunter to exclusively back-up their own titles. That's like suggesting that people only pirate movies they own and music they bought on CD. And did you hear that teenagers don't want to have sex and that women secretly hate chocolate? You get the idea.

If that's what people want to do with their free time then have at it, I'm not taking a moral stand against the idea of the Multi Game Hunter. What I don't understand is how this ad made it into the pages of GamePro. It feels wildly inappropriate, sort of like advertising condoms in Abstinence Weekly. It's like having a commercial for roller skates in Runner's World or a spread on vegetarian meals in Field & Stream magazine. I could go on for ages, I wrote down a ton of these things.

Beyond the legal and moral issues, this commercial does a horrible job of selling the product. The picture used is small and dark, making it difficult to fully appreciate what Soft Copiers Inc. is trying to sell you. It's not until you get to the bottom and read the awkwardly worded "facts" that you realize exactly what this device does, and even then it feels cryptic and awfully vague. So much of this commercial is used to spell out the words "Multi Game Hunter," yet that room should have been used to sell us on the idea of backing up any game in our library. And maybe they could have hired somebody to draw a better representation of the actual product ... or at least take a better quality picture. It's the little things that count.

FROM: I'm Bad Advertising ... Get Me Out of Here!