With next week’s release of “Pixels” in theaters across the country, classic video games and their bright, blocky protagonists will be in the spotlight once again. Pac-Man, the granddaddy of video game heroes, has been at the center of the film’s marketing, an attempt to catch nostalgic Gen Xers while also appealing to younger audiences. It’s like “Wreck-It Ralph,” but with Tyrion Lannister and Adam Sandler.
The medieval ostriches of “Joust,” the titular “Space Invaders,” and the spaceships of “Galaga” join Pac-Man in “Pixels,” and much like “Ralph,” copyright issues likely dictated which characters could show up on the big screen. As the official mascot of video game developer Namco (and unofficial mascot of the early arcade age), Pac-Man has become synonymous with classic video games and ’80s culture. Thirty-five years after his debut, he’s the central figure on posters for a summer sci-fi/adventure film. Why haven’t all the video game mascots held up as well as Pac-Man? Did they simply outlive their popularity, or did the companies pick the wrong mascot? And what about the companies and consoles that never got around to choosing a digital mascot?
One of the first consoles to invade American homes in the early ’80s was the Atari 2600. Rugged adventurer Pitfall Harry, of “Pitfall!,” arrived for the console one summer after “Raiders of the Lost Ark” introduced audiences to rugged adventurer Indiana Jones. It sold more than 4 million copies and gave a generation the false belief that jumping on an alligator’s head is an acceptable river-hopping technique. With the “Temple Run” mobile apps boasting more than 1 billion downloads, there must be room somewhere for Activision’s original side-scrolling hero.
Nintendo, as both a game developer and a console, famously presented Mario — one half of the famous Italian plumber brothers — as their official mascot. It’s hard to argue with their choice of a character who, since Shigeru Miyamoto created him for 1981’s “Donkey Kong,” has been featured in over 200 games. But what about Link? Should the “Zelda” franchise hero have been Nintendo’s public face? Is the character too serious to represent a company that depends on an image of family fun? If that’s the case, then stern intergalactic bounty hunter Samus Aran (“Metroid”) and vampire hunter Simon Belmont (“Castlevania”) are off the list. Tetris blocks don’t have the twinkle in their eye that Mario and Luigi possess, and mythological hero Pit (“Kid Icarus”) appeals to kids, but a half-naked angel archer is a tough sell even when Katniss and Hawkeye are setting records at theaters. Despite the notorious 1993 box-office bomb that was “Super Mario Brothers,” Nintendo was clearly on point when they decided a mustachioed, overall-wearing man with a predilection for butt-stomping mushrooms needed to be their brand.
What possessed Sega to choose a hedgehog when they needed an insanely fast, blue mammal obsessed with rings? Does it matter? Plumbers didn’t have a prior association with fire flowers.
In an alternate timeline, the bald, tiger pelt-swaddled caveboy known as Bonk would be a Mario-esque hero. The mascot for the long-forgotten Turbografx-16 console, Bonk starred in “Bonk’s Adventure,” the system’s marquee game. Bonk, who smashed enemies with his head (get it?), was on a quest to save pink reptile Princess Za from the evil King Drool. We may be ready for a caveboy/royal reptilian romance now, but we weren’t in 1990, and Bonk, despite receiving several sequels, fell into obscurity long before Y2K.
After failing to catch fire with their first (a winged ship named Opa-Opa) and second (the large-fisted monkey child, Alex Kidd) mascots, Sega hit the jackpot in 1991 with a hedgehog named Sonic. What possessed Sega to choose a hedgehog when they needed an insanely fast, blue mammal obsessed with rings? Does it matter? Plumbers didn’t have a prior association with fire flowers. What mattered were those new colors, new sounds, addictive gameplay and a character Sega could wrap its future marketing around. It was a bold choice and the best one. Twenty-five years later, with Sega out of the console market and focusing on third-party game development, Sonic has been regulated to lower billing in Mario crossover games and mobile apps, waiting for an inevitable comeback. In a perfect world, cult Sega characters Toejam & Earl, from the title of the same name, might have been media darlings. We don’t live in a perfect world.
When Sony jumped into the console market with the Playstation in 1995, two characters unofficially vied to be the face of the PS1 as well as its successor, the Playstation 2. Imagine Pitfall Harry by way of Samus Aran and you have Lara Croft from the instantly popular “Tomb Raider” series. Not saddled with Aran’s sartorial humility, players became obsessed with the hair-trigger controls and exotic locales of the series. Unlike “Metroid,” which hid its protagonist’s gender from players, “Tomb Raider” explicitly embraced Croft’s femininity. Challenging Croft for the Sony mascot throne was a character that made Mario look like a Rhodes Scholar. If Sega could make a small spiny animal a huge star, then why not reach even further into obscure animalia and anoint the omnivorous marsupial known as the bandicoot for your next franchise? Because it was the ’90s, Crash Bandicoot needed an attitude — to the EXTREME! And it worked. Until it didn’t. Croft got two mostly successful big-screen adaptations starring Angelina Jolie, while Crash ping-ponged between nine subsequent developers with his last game arriving in 2010. A case could be made for Solid Snake (“Metal Gear”), but he suffers from the same problem as Master Chief (“Halo”), Xbox’s most likely mascot, in the lack of family friendliness. Croft deserved and still can make a claim for the Sony video game mascot crown.
Is the film star of 2050 to be found in the video games of today? It’s hard to imagine the pimps of “Grand Theft Auto” or the digitized barnyard animals of “Minecraft” could entertain audiences for decades to come, but who thought a pill-popping ghost-chomper would be a Hollywood star in 2015?