7. A Pixelated Lizard Dies Again And Again And Again
The video games industry hit adolescence in the 90s with titles like Silent Hill, Resident Evil and Parasite Eve. Strides in console technology meant that these survival horror games were often as graphically bloody as their movie equivalents, inevitably causing an uproar in the popular media. The problem, in the view of our self-appointed moral guardians, was that games were supposed to be for children. What would happen to the squidgy, half-formed brain of Allan aged nine if he was exposed to a man made of pixels shooting some kind of plant/zombie hybrid also made of pixels? The whole panic was misjudged, because even the most innocuous of games think of Crash Bandicoot, Spyro or even bloody Gex portrayed the existential horror of death in harrowingly naked terms. The move to 3D gaming was a boon for developers. It allowed them the freedom to create new and unusual deaths for their loveable cartoon mascots. Take the first three Crash Bandicoot games in the original adventure, Crash can be squashed by boulders or exploded by TNT, but seconds later you're back in the game. By part the third, Crash can be sliced in half by broadsword-wielding b*stards, eaten by moral eels, impaled, bludgeoned, drowned incinerated or electrocuted, and the camera lingers helpfully, just in case you missed your adorable anthropomorphic pal dying horribly. A YouTube compilation of Crash 3 death animations runs to over 4 minutes, if you can get past the first. Worse, in every sense of the word, was Gex 3D. An awkward attempt to sass up the platforming genre, our hero (voiced, in the UK version by an audibly bewildered Leslie Phillips) told dirty jokes and made references to movies the target gamer would've been too young to know about. Aside from a surprisingly atmospheric horror world, the levels were standard fare. The only thing that really sticks in my mind (he says, deleting the Gex 3D 'Let's Play' videos from his browsing history) is the death screen. Should Gex come off the worse against fire, water or gravity, the image cuts to black, and our fly-munching lizard friend collapses face first to the ground, eyes shut, occasionally clutching a lily. That music as well nothing sounds more like existential failure than the Gex 3D death music. Perhaps aware that his life as a video game mascot meant nothing in the grand scheme of things, Gex always seemed resigned to his fate. He was one of many casualties in the Mascot Wars, tossed into an open grave with Bubsy, Croc, whatever the kid in Ape Escape was called and Baron. But it was Gex that I cared about, and every time he died, a little piece of my childhood went with him (said Emo Allan). You can keep yer zombies and yer killer cars- where was the moral outrage about that?