Remember all of those mascot characters? Y’know, the ones
with the colors and cartoony designs? Yeah, those. Remember how you would see
them in just about every game back in 80’s and 90’s? Where did they go and what
happened to them? It seems that the only mascots that are around are Mario,
Donkey Kong and Sonic. In the sense of general appearances. You can put Pikachu
in that category, too. I’d even say Pika is higher up on the ladder.
Well, I have a bit of the theory on what happened to these
mascots. Now, keep in mind that some of the stuff I’m about to say while being
a theory, is well-documented.
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Meet today's iconic video game protagonists: Niko Bellic, Solid Snake and
eighteen other guys that are indistinguishable. Image by Hubpages.
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The gradual disappearance of mascot characters is in
collaboration with the increasingly large amount of everymen. What are
everymen? They’re your go-to every day white dude with a scraggly beard,
five-o’ clock shadow and brown hair. Now, Mario is this, but with a mustache.
But he’s a mascot, and cartoony. Someone like Nathan Drake isn’t. Now, when did we see this? Around the seventh
generation of consoles, the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii. But we need to go a little
further back. Back in 1995, the SNES and SEGA Mega Drive were the top consoles,
but there were new consoles coming
along, ones that stressed their utilization
of…
GROUND BREAKING 3-D
The 3DO, Atari Jaguar, just to name a few. And then you had
the SEGA Saturn and Playstation. Back then, 3D was a big deal. It was a notable
jump from your usual 2D games. Me, I wasn’t really wowed by it. I just wanted
to play games. However, this was where a lot of people came in to gaming, being
impressed by those low-polygon models. These people ranged from people who knew
nothing on video games and people who didn’t like video games. The latter?
These people teased and bullied those who liked video games. Games like Mario
and Sonic were ‘gay’ and ‘lame’, and games with blood and gore or some scraggly
white dude (Yes, they existed then) are ‘cool’. But they wouldn’t know since
they really don’t play them as often or frequent. Now, with the inclusion of 3D
graphics, games were seen as cool and everyone was getting into it.
But anyone that knows video games knows this much: Graphics
do not make the game. This was a problem with some games on the Genesis and
SNES: They looked good, but the gameplay and controls were poor. The jump to 3D
only magnified which games were bad, and the bad ones were BAD. A dear friend
of mine, practically a brother brought a game called Killing Zone. It was a 3D
fighter, an early one for the PS1. He brought it and dropped it that night. It
was bad, clunky and downright unenjoyable. The music stuck out to me and the
skeleton character that turned into a giant skull when it jumped. That’s it.
And never mind the 3DO and Jaguar. Those were even less powerful, and had less
3D capabilities than the Saturn.
But in spite of the growing pains, 3D gaming slowly became
refined and playable. But back to the topic at hand, 3D wasn’t just the new
best thing, cinematic FMV’s were also pushed. Most of the disc space used were
for the FMV’s. Instead of pushing for games with great content and lasting
appeal, they used that space for fifteen second clips. Final Fantasy VII is guilty
of this. For the most part, games that tried to be games were still plentiful.
You had mascots running around, the good, the bad and the odd.
But, around the turn of the generation, with the PS2, the
Xbox and the Gamecube, these mascots started to thin out. Some were still
around, but the notable ones were in decline, or tried to jump and fell to
their deaths. At this point, graphics were getting more and more detailed and
certain franchises popped up or broke out into popularity. You know the ones.
Halo and Call of Duty were to the FPS genre what Sonic was to video games: When
they got popular, everyone wanted a CoD and a Halo. Everyone was pushing for a
mascot. The bad ones were bad and the ones in the middle needed more. But I’ll
take ten colorful mascots over ten brown and bloom war simulators.
I saw this as early as ’07. First person shooters were
played by people who weren’t really into video games. The dudebro audience.
Companies were pushing out FPS’es in droves, wanting to be CoD or have the next
CoD and so-called professional reviewers were handing out 9/10 Game of the Year
accolades left and right. Now, these companies were trying to push FPS’es as
the main go-to genre and while some of them were unique and even tried to have
something that stood out from the rest, there was an oversaturation of war sims
and every other game was now in the first person perspective. Why?
Because the target audience for these games are people who
didn’t like the cute, colorful mascots that were seen as childish. This is also
where games were trying to be pushed as an artform. The rise of graphics and
cinematics made for a wider appeal throughout. Tactics that were common in
Hollywood are now being inserted into video games. Marketing is also a major
factor in movies being promoted. Games like Call of Duty are heavily marketed,
with promotional deals and the like, The Halo 4 tie in with Doritos and
Mountain Dew being a notable example of how large video game marketing became.
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So, you have marketing, Hollywood-esque elements and
cinematics. But what does this have to do with mascot characters? Mascot
characters like Mega Man, Bomberman, Pac-Man, Mario, Donkey Kong, Sonic, Spyro
and Crash are to video games now what characters like Shrek, Spongebob and Bugs
Bunny are to cartoons and film: Childish. If you have a cute character that
appeals to children, or gives that impression, it’ll be seen as such. The games
where you’re a faceless person moving about in the first person perspective are
seen as adult and mature, and it isn’t coincidental that they’re rated M for
mature.
And since we’re diving into the whole push for video games
being like movies, this is another factor in the latter format: The faceless
guy is usually a scraggly white guy. Someone that said target audience can
‘relate’ to. I have a problem with this. Not because they’re scraggly white
guys, but because this is all they are. You can do your FPS perspectives with
any character. Hell, Banjo-Tooie had an FPS mode. Make some FPS’es with mascot
characters, it’s been done. There’s an FPS with schoolgirls and tentacle monsters. I'll play that before Generic War Simulator 14.
But I don’t care about being represented in video games.
It’s been done before and moreso before feminists made it an issue. Killer
Instinct? Shadow Man? The Combatribes? Street Fighter? Mortal Kombat? Just to
name a few. Shadow Man’s protagonist was a black man. All the games mentioned
have blacks as playables. While they’re not mascots or cartoony, they’re there.
I have the choice to use them. I don’t need someone to look like me to relate
to them. The ‘relatable’ excuse is just that – an excuse. You can’t play video
games unless you have some generic white guy you can put yourself in? I have to
do that every day when I boot up a game. I have to see what my character’s
objectives are and go for them. I have to put myself in his shoes and go
through his struggle.
This is why I prefer mascot characters. I don’t have to
deal with the bullshit above. I can just play their game. Save X from Y, or stop
X from destroying Y. Simple shit. Going back to the feminists, we’ve had female
characters in games. This also isn’t anything new. We’ve had them for the
longest. You just don’t want to take the time to find these females in gaming.
Just because the majority of gamers are men, doesn’t mean the industry is
sexist. Just because said females are beautiful doesn’t mean they’re
objectifying or offensive. This goes back into self-insertion: If you have to
have a white guy in your games to enjoy them, you’re part of the problem. If
you have to have an ugly woman in your video games to enjoy them, you’re part
of the problem. Stop trying to make video games like real life: I want to
escape the real world when I play video games.
Bring back my mascots!
Well, as I said before this was just a theory on why I feel
mascots have more or less died off. The companies who owned them dying didn’t
have anything to do with the FPS genre’s rise, granted. And we do have a few
mascot-esque characters still popping up from time to time. I hope we get more
mascot-like games in the future.
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