You know, coming to retro gaming in my forties meant I missed all the hype cycles when they actually happened. I wasn’t there for the original PlayStation launch, didn’t experience the N64 versus Saturn wars firsthand, completely skipped the whole mascot platformer explosion of the mid-90s. But that’s actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because when I finally started exploring these games a few years back, I could judge them on their own merits instead of through rose-colored glasses.
My daughter was the one who got me started on this particular rabbit hole. She’d picked up a copy of Croc: Legend of the Gobbos at some retro game store in Boulder and brought it over to my place, laughing about how ridiculous it looked. “Dad, you’ve got to see this thing,” she said, firing it up on my PlayStation. “It’s like someone took Mario 64, made it about a crocodile, and forgot to make it actually fun.”
She wasn’t wrong, but I ended up getting weirdly absorbed in it anyway. There’s something hypnotic about these collect-a-thon platformers, even the mediocre ones. You run around, grab shiny things, jump on enemies that look like they were designed by committee… it shouldn’t be engaging, but somehow it is. Maybe it’s the construction worker in me – I appreciate things that are built to a specific formula, even if that formula isn’t particularly inspired.
That led me down this whole path of hunting down forgotten mascot platformers from that era. Turns out there were dozens of them, maybe hundreds if you count all the regional releases and PC exclusives. Every publisher with a development team and a marketing budget seemed convinced they could create the next Sonic or Mario, just by slapping some attitude onto a cartoon animal and calling it a day.
I picked up Gex: Enter the Gecko at a garage sale for two bucks, mostly because the guy selling it insisted it was “way better than that Mario crap.” It… wasn’t. Gex himself is this wise-cracking gecko who apparently watched way too much television, because every other line out of his mouth is some pop culture reference that probably wasn’t that funny even when the game was new. Still, there’s something endearing about how hard it’s trying. The different TV-themed worlds were actually pretty creative – you’ve got your horror movie level, your kung fu level, your cartoon level. It’s derivative as hell, but at least it’s trying to be derivative in interesting ways.
Then there’s Glover, which might be the weirdest premise for a platformer I’ve ever encountered. You play as a sentient glove – not even an animal, just a glove – who has to guide a bouncing ball through obstacle courses. I bought it because the concept was so bizarre I figured it had to be either brilliant or completely insane. Turns out it was both. The core gameplay mechanic is actually pretty clever – you’re controlling two objects at once, the glove and the ball, and you have to coordinate them to solve puzzles and navigate platforms.
But man, the execution… it’s like they had this great idea and then handed it off to someone who’d never programmed a camera system before. I spent more time fighting with the viewpoint than I did actually playing the game. There’s this one level where you’re rolling the ball up a spiral ramp, and the camera keeps swinging around behind obstacles so you can’t see where you’re going. I must have fallen off that stupid ramp fifty times before I finally figured out I could sort of navigate by sound.
The thing about these games that you don’t really appreciate until you play a bunch of them back-to-back is how they all follow basically the same template. You’ve got your hub world, your themed levels branching off from it, your collectible items scattered around each level – usually gems or coins or fruit or whatever fits the theme. You’ve got your simple enemies that die in one hit, your basic jump-and-attack combat, your boss fights that follow predictable patterns.
I found this out the hard way when I bought like six of these games at once from some guy on Craigslist who was clearing out his collection. Jersey Devil, Bubsy 3D, Awesome Possum, a couple others I’d never heard of… I thought I was getting variety, but it was more like buying six different flavors of the same basic recipe. They all felt interchangeable after a while, which explains why most of them disappeared without a trace.
But every now and then you’d find one that did something genuinely different with the formula. Rocket: Robot on Wheels was this N64 game I’d never heard of until I saw it mentioned in some obscure gaming forum. It’s got this little robot protagonist who has to solve physics-based puzzles using realistic object interaction. You’re not just jumping on platforms and collecting stuff – you’re actually manipulating the environment, using teeter-totters and ramps and momentum to solve problems.
It’s still clearly following the mascot platformer playbook, but it feels like the developers actually understood what made Mario 64 special beyond just the surface elements. The physics feel solid, the puzzles require actual thought, the world feels like it operates by consistent rules instead of just video game logic. If more of these mascot games had put that kind of effort into their core mechanics instead of just focusing on character design and attitude, maybe the whole genre wouldn’t have crashed and burned so spectacularly.
The crash was pretty brutal when it happened. By the early 2000s, people were just sick of collecting random objects scattered around 3D worlds. Every game had gems or stars or rings or crystals, and they all felt meaningless after a while. The market got so saturated that even good platformers struggled to find an audience because people assumed they were just another derivative cash grab.
I missed all that fatigue the first time around, which means I can appreciate these games for what they actually are instead of what they represented. Some of them are genuinely terrible – Bubsy 3D controls like you’re driving a shopping cart with broken wheels, and the less said about the camera system the better. But others are just… fine. Competent. They’re not going to blow your mind, but they’re perfectly playable ways to spend a few hours if you’re in the right mood.
There’s also something fascinating about them from a historical perspective. You can see the entire industry learning how to make 3D games in real time, and these mascot platformers were like the test subjects. Every studio was trying to figure out camera angles, control schemes, level design principles that would work in three dimensions. A lot of them got it wrong, but their mistakes probably helped the developers who came later get it right.
I’ve got maybe twenty of these games now, scattered across different systems. My daughter thinks it’s hilarious that I’ve become this expert on forgotten 90s mascot platformers, especially since I approach them like archaeological artifacts instead of childhood memories. But that’s exactly why I think they’re worth preserving and playing – they tell this story about a specific moment in gaming history when anything seemed possible and everyone was throwing ideas at the wall to see what stuck.
Most of them didn’t stick, obviously. But the ones that did – Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, Rayman – they validated the basic concept enough to keep people trying. And even the failures contributed something, even if it was just showing other developers what not to do.
These days when I fire up something like Gex or Jersey Devil, I’m not looking for a masterpiece. I’m looking for a window into this weird experimental period when the gaming industry was trying to figure itself out. Sometimes that window shows you something genuinely innovative that got overlooked. Sometimes it just shows you why certain design ideas didn’t catch on. Either way, it’s worth looking through.
Timothy discovered retro gaming at forty and never looked back. A construction foreman by day and collector by night, he writes from a fresh, nostalgia-free angle—exploring classic games with adult curiosity, honest takes, and zero childhood bias.
