Am I the only one reminded of TMNT 1 by the Nightmare on Elm Street game?

So, I hope this isn't considered necroposting, but does anyone have a backup of the World War III ad? The image seems to have disappeared, and I can't find it or anything like it anywhere else.

I've got the flyer, so I can post it (without the history-destroying watermarks this time)

You are such a martyr.

Sorry, that might have sounded a little harsher than it should have, but as someone who obviously cares a lot about preserving history, watermarking images that might be one-of-a-kind gets under my skin a bit.

Anyway, scan attached, enjoy!

Awesome thanks for sharing Frank!

That sounds like a good game too bad it was never released

Let's not lose our heads here, this was still LJN.

Personally, I'm kinda confilicted. haha

I can understand watermarking for preventing fakes or anything that can be used to scam someone, even if it was for something that's one-of-a-kind with information being too esoteric for people to look up (Something a scammer could take advantage of). But at the same time, I'm all for preservation, in that when something that is extremely rare comes along, it's nice to have it preserved without watermarks tainting it.

 

I feel kinda bad about the snarky way I phrased it (sorry Penguin!), so I'm going to explain my position on this as best I can. This might be totally unfair, and I'm willing to hear out the opposing side here, if there is one!

Here is where watermarking makes sense to me:

- A photograph of an item for sale. We've all seen fake NWC auctions using someone else's photos, so for stuff like that, it makes a lot of sense.
- Your own original work. If you create an original piece of art or something and are afraid of people posting it without crediting you, putting your signature on it.
- Something of extremely high value that is likely to be bootlegged. I don't like it, but I can see the argument for, I don't know, altering a scan of the Stadium Events box slightly so that a fake is easy to spot.

I don't understand something like this flyer, though. It's not a hot item, no one is going to try to fake an auction for it. And sales sheets are not popular enough to have "repros" - and if they were, I'd think that would make authentic sheets even more valuable.

As far as I'm concerned, the only valid argument for watermarking this thing is if you believe that having a watermark-free scan will devalue the original flyer. And in order to believe that, you have to believe:

1. Your potential buyer is not interested in the original object, they're only interested in a clean scan of the artwork. Therefore:
2. Your potential buyer is not a collector.

I don't believe either of these are possibly true, so to my mind, watermarking something like this is defacing history for no reason at all. If no one else ever found a flyer for this game, and Penguin's house suddenly caught on fire, the only documentation we'd ever have for World War III would be an image with a watermark on it.

The only POSSIBLE reason I can see for doing this, assuming all of the above logic is sound, is because you believe your potential sale is to someone like me who wants to scan it and share it with the community, and you want to charge them for that privilege. But I don't think that was the intent.

The watermark, if opaque, isn't damaging history.

Fair enough. Some valid points there. I think where I'm conflicted is with something other than the flyer. I didn't want to mean that the flyer was the case or anything. I apoloigize if that seemed the intention. haha

I was thinking of some of the points you already mentioned before you posted. The part I highlighted I also agree with (And bit of a flaw in my original logic), and want to add that something like the flyer that is esoteric and not a hot item, it probably wouldn't harm the hobby as a whole-- even if someone where to repro it and be a scumbag trying to pass it off as something, I don't think they'd get far into doing something. Again, if they did, it's still too small to have an effect.

Oh, and don't worry, you didn't sound snarky. It's more of a place of passion, you just take preservation seriously. Not at all a bad thing IMO, especially on a collector's site. Thanks for doing what you do!  

I know I'm putting a lot of weight on some LJN garbage game that nobody's likely to ever care about, but if another copy of this thing hadn't been found, there is a very real possibility that THE ONLY SURVIVING RECORD OF AN ENTIRE GAME EXISTING is an image that has some internet person's name vandalized over it. Maybe some of you are okay with that, but I am not. I care about these things too much, whether that's healthy or not. I'm an historian at heart, and I think we're all living in the golden age of this incredible medium that we're calling "video games," and I want people who are like me 50 years from now to have the cleanest records possible for what video games used to be. That's my thing, it's what I'm passionate about, and it's why I get so wound up sometimes with things like watermarking, or changing the code in an unreleased ROM, or anything else that defaces artifacts instead of preserving them.

I fully accept and acknowledge that not everyone thinks this way, I'm just explaining myself as best I can here.

true true.
you know what the picture remindes me of is Global Thermonuclear War from war games 

 

nice flyer frank.

Apparently World War III (http://images.shoutwiki.com/lostg......) was also canceled for Sega in 1992-93 (https://segaretro.org/The_Third_W......). Yest, the game seems to be similar to The Third World War by Mega CD (https://segaretro.org/images/d/d0......).

Links are broken.
 

Oh ... World War III:
http://images.shoutwiki.com/lostg...

Thirld World War (Mega CD):
https://segaretro.org/images/d/d0...

Announced for Sega in 1992
https://segaretro.org/The_Third_W...