Granted, the “nickel and diming” of hotline numbers (1900, 0900, etc) was nowhere as bad as today’s cash shops, but a lot of us simply forgot they were always hungry for all our money
Here’s a bunch other hotline ads for you to peruse - https://www.retromags.com/gallery/category/1729-telephone-hotlines/
PS: I never understood these american numbers that used letters, how were you supposed to know what was the actual number?


That was there for a CD-ROM add-on, which was planned from the start but never actually released. Nintendo was working on it as a collaboration with both Phillips and Sony. After it got canned, both Phillips and Sony still had rights to some of the technology as part of the collaboration. So Phillips decided to release their own gaming system based upon what they had, and that was the (largely forgotten) CD-i system. And of course Sony did the exact same thing, and that became the Playstation. The rest is history.