bubsy concept art featured in GamePro July 1992 magazine.
For everyone who is not-Frank, bc I automatically assume if its in a magazine Frank already knows everything about it.
https://archive.org/details/GamePro_Issue_036_July_1992/page/n55/mode/2up
**EDIT: Ristar having received exactly 0% of the vote has been replaced by Conker**
BONUS CONTENT: Lizstar's Ristar GDQ speed run https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYiPmie8ui8
Extremely bold move putting Lord Bonk on this list
Don't do Ristar like that
Yeah, couple of not bad mascots in here that could be replaced by, for example, boogerman, chuck rock, conker, blinx (poor blinx), etc
Awesome possum is a good choice though
Even at his worst Sparkster doesn't belong on any list with Zool (neither do Ristar and Bonk).
...and as an Amiga fan I feel I have to apologise for Zool - we were trying to stay relevant and... well, you know how that turned out :S
Bubsy has succeeded as a mascot… for bad video games.
And for what it‘s worth, Gex’s three mainline games are all adequate.
this is tough because I like all of them
I have been swatted by the Gex Hive because I voted for Gex
sonic has been in more shitty games than all of those animals put together
I‘d be interested to hear everyone’s rationales for voting which character, since I think there‘s a lot of ways to take this…
For me, the worst mascot character has to do less with the quality of the game, and more the quality of the character itself, if the question is “worst attempt at a mascot character” as opposed to “worst attempt at a mascot character game.” A little pedantic maybe, but to me it makes sense! It’s for this reason I think a lot of these are passable - maybe not the most appealing or unique designs, but most of them are largely inoffensive. To me, it's down to Bubsy or Gex because their gimmicks as characters rather than games are incredibly annoying, being so focused on reference comedy and having little personality outside of that. For me though, Gex takes it. Come at me Gex Hive
Where cool spot at?
Also I picked bubsy then realized Gex was on there. Shoot. I can’t retroactively change I guess.
I have fond, almost definitely rose-tinted memories of both Zool and Zool 2 having got both as birthday presents for PC way back when my parents indulged me in getting games for my birthday and actually surprising me with them too.
I picked Awesome Possum purely down to having absolutely no desire to play a game with that character. And before anyone says Gex, I kinda did want to play an N64 Gex game as a naive preteen.
I voted for sparkster because he takes the least amount of heat. Bubsy and gex have had enough abuse
On behalf of the Gex Hive, I come at you - specifically, with the manual to the original Gex, wherein we learn the eponymous gecko is but Cloud Strife's fursona.
To me, Awesome Possum is the obvious worst of that bunch. He's the most obvious Sonic ripoff in that the main bad guy is “Dr. Machino.” Even when I was a kid, I thought it looked kind of bad.
Gex was kind of amusing and definitely seemed like a logical 32-bit evolution to edgy 16-bit mascot characters. Rocket Knight Adventures was awesome, so Sparkster gets my stamp of approval even though I've never played his titular game. When I was a kid, I legitimately thought that Bubsy was cool; hell there's a tiny stupid piece of my brain that still thinks that. I feel like Aero the Acro-Bat appealed to a type of furry that other mascots didn't (I don't know why I think that, but I do). Ristar was made by Sonic Team and I don't think they were really trying to make a new mascot as much as they were just trying to move away from Sonic. Bonk totally worked as the TurboGrafix mascot, even moreso in Japan where he's PC-Genjin.
Zool... IDK, I assume if you're British his game was cool?
I voted for (i.e. against) Awesome Possum as it is the one I would feel the least confident drawing upon memory if my life depended on it. That would seem like a very important criteria for a mascot character, no?
It’s easy to shit on Bubsy because of the game’s poor quality and the transparent poochy-ness of the whole enterprise but at least the character design was somewhat memorable and included striking (if unsophisticated) features such as that weird exclamation mark T-shirt.
At the opposite end of the possum spectrum, Sparkster the rocket-powered opossum seem to have been designed specifically to answer some game design ideas. And anything rocket-powered deserves a thumb up. You could have Sparkster in Smash Bros and he (she? it?) could make for a genuinely good character, feature-wise. Similarly, Gex and Ristar seem to have been conceived with a good idea of what kind of game world and mechanics they were meant to explore. The original Gex was a genuinely interesting platform game.
In less objective terms, it‘s a Berlin Wall crumbling generation euro kid thing but I can never stay mad at Amiga and ST players trying to pump up Zool as their legitimate answer to Sonic, for the same reasons I have fond memories of Body Blows claiming in all seriousness to one up Street Fighter II. That’s why you Americans cannot possibly understand our shared love of Chuck Rock and Eurovision. We would not have had Brexit if they still released Chuck Rock games.
I am (perhaps generously) assuming Bonk is only here to rile up the website‘s administration and I wholeheartedly support this sort of “rebellious teen” energy coming from the Insert Credit forums. @exodus’s not even my real dad!
Boogerman has extremely smooth animation and debuted when fart jokes were peak comedy to me, so it unironically has a place in my heart. I haven't played it since I was 11 but I'm absolutely positive the humor holds up extremely well.
this poll was mostly aimed at all the sega genesis platform exclusive anthropomorphic 2d platformer sonic clones. I've never grouped Boogerman in with them. Boogerman is a human custodial engineer and a working class hero. Gritty and platform-agnostic like Earthworm Jim
Please remove Sparkster from the list, thank you
I demand that Sparkster be replaced with Ty the Tasmanian Tiger
Also it‘s decidedly Gex for me. Most of these are appropriately cringey, crass, and manipulative in their own way, but I think what ultimately puts Gex on another level for me is relatively simple. Gex was a character, like a good deal of this list, who was designed specifically to maximize the degree to which it would compel a child to want to compel a parent to purchase a copy of the game for them, and to minimize the amount of effort that would go into the actual nitty gritty of creating a character and a world and to give them compelling reasons to exist. That’s something that certainly occurs on a spectrum, and I'm sure more than a few of these were lovingly crafted on some level, but this is what makes forced mascots so disagreeable. In that regard, the worst of these are probably also the ones that are getting the most votes if I had to guess.
The reason Gex goes over the line for me is because it feels like Gex is a character who commits what I feel is one of the groadiest, most dishonorable sins of mass marketing, which is trying to appeal to too many demographics at once. Perhaps out of some potentially highly coke-fueled delusion that appealing to all of them with a little bit for everyone means they can just double or triple sales, as if this isn't deeply alienating to everyone who has the misfortune of engaging with it. Gex feels roughly equally like a character designed to get money out of the parents' of kids who don't know any better as the other most baldfaced offender on here, Bubsy, but it feels a lot like the marketing devils with the most creative influence on the creation of Gex also just had no idea what appeals to children either, or wanted to appeal to, uh, I don't know, people in their 30s too? Gex feels like Michael Eisner was somehow involved and although I'm sure it doesn't need to be said here, that's not a compliment.