RetroforceGO!: Episode 5 recording tonight; all hail the mascots!

Can I hear what it would sound like if Topher and Alex made out through Skype?

Alex Kidd was the Sega mascot until they dropped him in favor of that blue rodent Sonic in 1991. How great was he? Big ears... red hair... I didn't know if he was a human or some sort of monkey hybrid. Either way, he rocked.

If he were in Smash Bros., it'd be a duel 20 years in the making: Mario vs. Alex Kidd. Monkey-boy vs. portly plumber. And I think we all know who'd come out on top. Alex. Then, he'd go on to crush Sonic, reclaiming his rightful place as Sega's mascot. Actually, on second thought... who'd want that job anyway?

Ride the carousel!! ASCEND!! ASCEND!!

By the way... Wonder Boy was never actually a mascot...

@Necros: You make a good point, but the Wonder Boy IP occupied a sort of no-man's land. First, and most notably, he predates Sonic by five years. Secondly, the IP was owned by Sega, although the games were developed by a third-party developer and then ported by Hudson to other (non-Sega) systems. The games were so heavily altered in their adaptation first from east to west and then from console to console that there was very little continuity to the character. In fact, in the most notable ports for the games -- such as those for the NES (which became Adventure Island) and for Hudson's own PC Engine -- the Wonder Boy moniker was dropped entirely.

So, I argue that Wonder Boy was not, in fact, a mascot. Instead, as with many games in the early console days, he was an IP that was simply adapted across consoles to create games that did not necessarily depend on the Wonder Boy moniker to promise gamers a particular experience or to represent a company.

See, THIS is the kind of thing they should be discussing on RetroforceGO! Not just mascots (this one sucks... this one was awesome...), but how to define a mascot and how they evolve over time.

Of course, our discussion is simply semantics; if my memory serves, the Wonder Boy games (and their spinoffs) were pretty poor.

Well, I know Adventure Island was nothing special, but I've heard that the later Wonder Boy games were pretty good. A lot of people were pretty excited to import the Sega Ages collection of every version of every (true) Wonder Boy game.

And I second that sentiment: let's hear the RFGO! team tackle this specific discussion.

why does everyone hate balloon fight? I FRIGGIN LOVE IT!

Holy crap, Logan's Run. Wow. Never expected to see an image of that on Dtoid. You guys are full of surprises.

Erm, mascots? I miss the polygon head guy from the early Playstation 1 marketing. He needed his own game.