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[Parsely]

I don't remember seeing commercials for games, really. Not until Halo came out. I just rented games that looked cool and bought them if they were good, or if my friends or dad or brother said they would be good.

[wierd]

They used to come out seasonally.  Heavy advertising for game products hit around christmas, and over summer vacation.

Nintendo and Sega especially did VERY AGGRESSIVE marketing in the 90s for their consoles.  Youtube is full of vintage advertisement footage. I can still hear the "Genesis does!" music if I think about it.

Due to the durability (and price!) of cartriges in the era (since compact discs were not really a mainstay until the late 90s, and game consoles were slow to adopt them.) many kids would bring them over when they visited their friends, and play each other's favorite games that way.

(One of the things I find particularly insidious about the current trend of trying to lock game purchases to physical consoles by console makers of late, is that it sabotages this early dynamic I remember fondly.)

Game commercials almost ALWAYS were totally over-hyped-- but they DID let you know that a game existed.  The usual strategy used by kids in my generation was to see the commercial, then ask your classmates if anyone had purchased the game and played it. Then ask that kid if it was any good or not. 

[Spehss _]

Constantly going to video game stores. Magazines. Ads on TV. Word of mouth. Constantly going to video game stores.

[Criptfeind]

I didn't know of video games before the internet. I had like, the N64, and sometimes a friend might mention a game being good. But other then that it was just occasionally go to a video game and pick up a game totally randomly. Probably partially why I wasn't a huge video game player for various parts of my life. Luckily though I was so bad at videos as a child... It was unbelievable. A few of the big ones, Mario 64, Banjo kazooie, and Ocarina of time, and a bit of trying to unlock new levels in Yoshi story (I actually just now looked up how to unlock the levels.... I was totally wrong for the last 15 years...) took me though most of my childhood practically. Although It probably didn't help that I could only play games a few days a week. But still, these games took me years to fully go though. And so I guess I had no need to know of other games.

[Bumber]

In 2005? Word of mouth. E3. Internet. Looking through stores.

2005 was just before the Wii came out. I think it was already announced as the Nintendo Revolution by that point. Made a decision to buy TES:Oblivion (2007) based on a banner add on GameFAQs. There were some commercials. I found out about Crystal Chronicles (2004) during a movie preview, of all things.

Back before then I relied more on word of mouth and stores. Everyone would be talking about the new Pokemans or Smash Bros., and I learned of several games by playing them at my friends' houses. Blockbuster had a bunch of N64 games to rent. I think that continued into the Gamecube era. I know I rented Pikmin. Electronics stores had areas where you could demo games. There were a bunch of PC game demos on the internet (MegaUpload?) and on CDs, too. Played an Age of Empires trial that came bundled with a bunch of others back in around 1998. Maybe the trials even came installed on my Windows 98, I don't recall.

[Cyroth]

By 2005 I've already been playing MMORPGs for 7 years, so finding out about games online would have been easy.
Before internet became cheap enough for casual surfing (around 2000) I'd have used magazines. My siblings and me were all subscribing different magazines from our allowances and shared them.

[LordBucket]

How did we find out about video games in 2005?

This part of we found out about them on the internet.

By 2005 I've already been playing MMORPGs for 7 years, so finding out about games online would have been easy.

8 years, but pretty much this, yes.

Though to be fair, in the 90s I was finding out about games mostly by word of mouth. Occasionally by physically walking into stores. Bookstores, mostly. I don't think we had any dedicated game stores back then.

Before internet became cheap enough for casual surfing (around 2000)

In my case I was on the internet before we had a subscription service. Contact the local college via modem for access to telnet, gopher, etc. then tunnel to www via winsock. A few years after that AOL and Compuserve started to become popular, but I was never a subscriber and for a long time there were were always free internet solutions for anybody who knew how to use AT commands. I actually don't remember when I made the switch to cable.

[Guardian G.I.]

I used to buy magazines about video games in 2005. We had internet, but back then it was very slow and very expensive.

[itisnotlogical]

In 2005, I downloaded a ton of demos. I primarily played games just by googling random demos, since we were a bit strapped for cash and couldn't afford much in the way of games. Demos were a great way to play a very diverse amount of games without spending much money. Our internet was so slow that I often had to leave games downloading overnight, and mom was always aggravated that the desktop was constantly covered with icons for games that I only played once or twice.