Playstation

In 1999, Sony’s PlayStation was still shaping its cultural identity. Rather than competing through traditional advertising focused on graphics or gameplay, the brand leaned into a more abstract, emotionally driven approach. PlayStation’s European marketing arm, particularly in the UK, embraced experimental creatives who could position gaming as something intellectual, subversive, and culturally forward. Chris Cunningham, already known for unsettling and avant-garde music videos, was a natural fit for this vision.

Often referred to as “Mental Wealth,” the commercial features a teenage Scottish girl standing against a plain background, delivering a strangely poetic monologue about PlayStation and the idea of mental richness. As she speaks, her face subtly and then dramatically warps through digital manipulation. Her eyes shift, her proportions distort, and her expressions move into uncanny territory, creating a disquieting tension between natural performance and artificial alteration.

The spot barely resembles an advert in the conventional sense. There is no gameplay footage, no product explanation, and no clear call to action. Instead, it functions more like a short experimental film that leaves the viewer unsettled, intrigued, and unsure of what they have just seen.

Chris Cunningham had already built a reputation for confronting audiences with disturbing and unforgettable imagery. His work frequently explored themes of identity, bodily distortion, and the uneasy relationship between humans and technology. Those same concerns appear clearly in the PlayStation spot, where the human face becomes a digital object, stretched and reshaped in ways that feel both playful and threatening.

Rather than selling a console, Cunningham was helping PlayStation sell a mindset. Gaming was framed not as entertainment for children, but as something strange, intelligent, and slightly dangerous.

When the commercial aired, reactions were mixed and intense. Some viewers were confused, others disturbed, and many were unsure what exactly was being advertised. That ambiguity was precisely the point. The advert lingered in people’s memories because it refused to explain itself.

Over time, Mental Wealth became one of the most discussed and remembered PlayStation commercials ever made, frequently cited as an example of how far the brand was willing to push creative boundaries during the late 1990s.

The PlayStation spot endures because it does not age like conventional advertising. It feels closer to art than marketing, and closer to a psychological provocation than a sales pitch. By embracing discomfort, abstraction, and ambiguity, it helped define PlayStation’s identity as a brand unafraid of being strange - and in doing so, left behind a piece of advertising that still feels unsettling decades later.