The 1990s were a tough time if you were a cartoony (and, more particularly, animal-themed) mascot in platform games. Amidst that harsh, unforgiving landscape, unless your name began with M and you were in the profession of plumbing, or it began with S and you happened to be a speedy blue rodent, you were basically out of luck. Many victims were claimed by the market’s oversaturated desire for every console to have its own poster boy – a frontrunner to plaster all over their ads, lookin’ hip, cocky and edgy. Names that bit the dust in this way included Bubsy Bobcat, Aero the Acro Bat, and… Oscar. Not ‘Oscar the Something-or-Other,’ not ‘Oscar Xtreme’, just… Oscar. Really.
Gex and mascots in the 90s
A lot of folks’ll tell you that most of these failures were deserved, and looking at the quality of such titles as Bubsy 3D, it’s tough to disagree. Sure, there were the odd gems here and there, but on the whole very few mascots managed to stick (no matter how much adhesive fecal matter studios threw at the wall). However, there was one character who just about scraped through to the next millennium, and who has enjoyed something of a critical reappraisal in recent years, is Gex. As the name suggests, he’s a gecko rocking shades, and he debuted as the intended rep for the 3DO system in the 90s. For more information on that console, incidentally, check out the newest issue of our mag, where I interview its creator, and industry legend, Trip Hawkins.
Following his muted maiden voyage on the doomed 3DO, Gex made his way onto such platforms as the GameBoy Colour, the PS1 and the N64. He established a small, but devoted, cult following in his tail-whippin’ wake. Ultimately, he starred in three games before being banished to the same mascot void as Bubsy and his ilk. His sales were technically impressive: a combined 15 million units across the franchise to date. All the same, most fans (reasonably) assumed that we’d seen the last of the rad, raucous reptile for good.
A renewal of IP
As NintendoLife reports, that might not be the case. Gex could very well be making a comeback, via a singularly unexpected catalyst. Said catalyst being Square-Enix, of Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts fame, who’ve apropos-of-nothing filed a trademark for the Gex IP.
“Following on from Square announcing in 2015 that it would allow developers to create games based on older IP as part of the ‘Square Enix Collective’ project, the company has now filed a trademark for ‘Gex’ in Europe,” states the report.
The trademark was lodged on December 15th in Europe. It had fans convinced “that this HAS to mean SOMETHING,” (rabid capitalisation not my own). A logical supposition, considering the series has lain deader than a decaying dodo in a dry desert for near-enough to two decades.
How about you? Would you like to see Gex return? Let us know!
Via, NintendoLife.
