In the stumbling, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics did not die and was held in 2021. In the past, everyone would pay attention to many topics of the Olympic Games: What is the environment of the Olympic Village? What do athletes eat? What are the athletes' preparation and performance? This Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games is also indispensable to such topics, but I am afraid that the answer will be uncomfortable: athletes sleep in cardboard beds, eat food from Fukushima, and the results? Athletes from all over the world are naturally "good" under the "care" of the Yamato national referee.
In addition to these questions, everyone will also be obsessed with the cute Olympic mascot, the mascot of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games is called Miraitowa, Miraitowa is derived from the Japanese words "mirai" and "towa", "mirai" means "future"; "towa" means "forever", representing the tokyo 2020 Olympic Games will bring eternal hope to everyone in the world in the future. As the mascot of this year's Tokyo Olympic Games, "Future Forever", it may also be the mascot with the lowest sense of existence in history, although the dolls are cute, but there are no people wearing doll costumes in the opening ceremony, but this year's "glamorous rays" dance has become a hot topic. Except for the athletes, everyone seems to have forgotten what the mascot of this Olympic Games is.
Just when everyone seemed to be ignoring the existence of the Olympic mascot, a message about the cost of 5,000 yen (nearly 300 yuan) for taking photos with Japanese mascots caught people's eyes. The operation of taking photos with the mascot and spending money has surprised many netizens, and when I heard the news, I couldn't help but feel angry and funny.
Speaking of mascots, what is it? According to an encyclopedia, the mascot, also known as the cute thing, is the primitive culture of human beings formed by primitive human beings in the struggle with nature. There is no data on the origin of the mascot, but from the history of the Olympic Games, the earliest Olympic mascot is the black dachshund "Waldi" that appeared in the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Olympic mascot is a convention, but in fact, "everything can be a mascot" has long become a trend in Japan, and even an annual mascot competition, relying on cute and cute attributes, game manufacturers or game platforms also like to use the popular characters in their own works as "mascots", in essence, the Olympic Games is also a game, then what is the fate of the mascots in the game?
Video game mascots are mascots used by video game companies to promote companies and their specific video game series. There are few rules about which characters are considered mascots of the series, but they are usually those that get a lot of attention in the game's promotional media, and are usually those who are known outside of the game platform: Mario of Nintendo, Sonic of Sega, for example.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="7" > early video game mascot</h1>
Pong is often considered the first true video game, and its impact was to increase interest in coding in the seventies of the last century — that's the essence of video games, software with a little entertainment value.
▲ An arcade running PONG
Immediately after the arcade brought games to the public, Pac-Man was introduced in 1980, the first original game mascot and still remains the mascot of Bandai Namco.
On July 15, 1983, the superstar with a total sales volume of 60 million units worldwide, Nintendo FC, which was the king of Nintendo's hardware field at home, was officially launched. On September 13, 1985, Nintendo released a true game masterpiece, Super Mario. To date, the game has sold more than 40 million copies, which means that almost every player who buys FC consoles has one. Mario also became the hot Nintendo mascot at the time. As the mascot of Nintendo, in addition to the typical Mario-type action platformer series, Mario often takes on a lead role in game series such as motorsport, sports, and role-playing or participates in branching series of other characters. Mario's multiple related game series have collectively sold more than 500 million copies worldwide, making him one of the most successful characters of all time.
Originally, Mario's name was "Jumpman", and Mario's name first appeared on the American version of Donkey Kong in a flyer. The origin is that in 1980 (the year when Nintendo was just established), Mario Sigalel Siegel, the landlord of the Nintendo office of the United States, came to the door one day and asked why Nintendo of the United States had been in arrears for a long time. After his departure, Nintendo employees found that the landlord looked very similar to "Jumpman", so they named "Jumpman" Mario.
Shigeru Miyamoto later personally confirmed in a 2015 Q&A that Mario's fame and fortune came from Fang Donggel.
Shigeru Miyamoto nodded
In the eyes of players, Mario is just a cute mascot for Nintendo, but from the perspective of brand marketing, Mario can not only narrow the distance between players and the game, but also meet the emotional demands of players to a certain extent, and transform into actual profits. When Mario became a household name, mascot fever really began to catch on.
There was also a familiar mascot in the 80s, the most famous monster in the history of RPG - the slime. Slimes first appeared in 1986's Dragon Quest, the first and weakest enemy in the game, and has appeared similarly in all Dragon Quest games since. However, it is precisely because of "weakness" that every player who has been exposed to DQ remembers this thing, and it is after the first fire in the player group that Enix noticed that this soft and cute thing should be established as a mascot.
Although the early mascots were very iconic, they still lacked some personality or character, and perhaps that's the drawback of the 8-bit game.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="42" > mascot wars</h1>
In the late 1980s, Sega really kicked off the era of 16 home consoles through mega drive, and in order to compete with Nintendo and Mario, they set out to create their own mascot to create a blue hedgehog, the iconic character of later Sega.
Before 1990, Sega's mascot was not Sonic, and Opa-Opa in Sega's 1986 arcade game Fantasy Zone is sometimes referred to as Sega's first mascot character. Alex Kidd's popularity in Alex Kidd's Adventures in the Fantasy World of Alex Kidd, produced the same year, peaked in popularity in the late 1980s, but Sega wanted a mascot to rival Mario, and the little plane and the little boy were apparently deemed unsuitable for the task.
Interestingly, although Sonic was created to play against Mario, Sonic and Mario actually co-founded the game. That's right, Mario and Sonic at the Beijing Olympics.
It was released by Nintendo in Japan, Sega in other regions, and on the Wii in November 2007 and on the Nintendo DS handheld in January 2008. It was the first official video game for the 2008 Summer Olympics, licensed by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) through the exclusive licensing of International Sports Multimedia Corporation (ISM), and was the first official crossover game featuring characters from the Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog series. Since then, the game has launched its latest one at every Olympic Games, including this year's Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.
Sonic is a mascot with attitude, a model for the mascot of the 90s. Attitude mascots all have some common characteristics, they are snarky but very likable, and later the crystal-powered Lizard Man (Gex), Sony's Crash Bandicoot and many other characters have similar characteristics.
When it comes to the Ancient Wolf, everyone may be familiar with him, and his original meaning was intended to become sony's mascot, to compete with Mario of Nintendo and Sonic the hedgehog of Sega.
One of the main reasons Naughty Dog chose to develop The Wolf of The Jungle Book (then dubbed "Sonic's Ass Game") for Sony was Sony's lack of mascot characters that could compete with Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog and Nintendo's Mario. To get a cute image, the design team purchased a field guide on Tasmanian mammals and chose wombats, long-tailed kangaroos and kangaroos as options.
From a translational point of view, the Chinese translation of the name "Ancient Confused Wolf" is actually wrong, he is a possum mutated by evolutionary rays. From the current point of view, the 3D jumping gameplay of the Ancient Wolf Generation seems a bit mediocre, but at the time, it was enough to attract the attention of Sony's internal high-level. The character was also widely recognized, with he voted the 11th best video game character in the Guinness World Records Players Edition in 2011.
At the same time that the Wolf of The Ancient Puzzle opened up the situation, Insomniac Games developed the mascot for the PlayStation, the Dragon Sparrow, a character that has been used as the mascot of the PlayStation video game console in popular culture and has also appeared in several games along with the Wolf of the Ancient Puzzle.
In the years since, game mascots have mushroomed in the public eye. The competition for mascot platformers in the 90s was so fierce that developers from all corners of the globe were scrambling to compete. From Mega Man to Bunker of The Great Adventures of Bunker, to Linke of Final Fantasy's Chocobo The Legend of Zelda, there's always a game mascot that impresses us.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="43" > from the decline of the game mascot to the real mascot</h1>
Playstation 2, GameCube, and Xbox came out in the early 2000s, marking the beginning of a successful end to mainstream mascots. As technology advances and games become more interactive, and the main audience has grown into teenagers by this time, games must offer a little more than the interesting characters in the cartoon world.
Since 2001, the Sergeant Major has been the face of the helmet-wearing, emotionless Xbox. This Spartan warrior was the last savior of all the games he had participated in, tall and mighty, brave and tenacious. His legendary experiences have led him and the Halo game series to nearly every list. Microsoft insisted on symbolizing the sergeant major, and the official never made its true face public, so that the helmet became the sergeant major's body. The glorious image of the sergeant major is not only a representative of the aura, but even a representative of xbox. The charm of this personal hero is evident here.
While the silent and expressionless image of the Sergeant Major has also been seen by some critics as a flaw in the role, other media outlets believe that these traits are more likely for players to play their roles. Therefore, in addition to being a symbolic character in the Halo series, the Sergeant Major is also a video game mascot of similar status such as Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog.
▲ The latest XBOX mascot, laughs
And as more mature games begin to take center stage, many cartoonish mascots are inevitably left behind and forgotten. In the new century, the gradual decline of mascot culture cannot be ignored. It's not that game brand mascots have disappeared from the face of the earth, but that they've evolved with audiences and the industry, and that more mature games and esports have truly changed this gaming mascot culture.
The game mascot of the 90s was the face of the console, which is not the driving force behind the creation of games today, it is more about the brand than the game now. Games are now faster paced, not just the way we play, but also the way we consume. As a result, developers are so busy making the next title or the next big hit that few will design a mascot specifically for the game.
Despite this, people are still very enthusiastic about mascot culture. Japan is a mascot country, and each region has a mascot sightseeing ambassador, and every time an event or competition is carried out, a mascot is designed to promote the mascot, and even every company, school, etc. has a mascot that "endorses" its own style and culture. It can be said that in Japan, the mascot is the city's business card and an important source of income, and it is also an important means of revitalizing the economy. Most of these mascots are keywords such as "healing system" and "cute and cute", such as Kumamoto Bear in Kumamoto Prefecture, whose emojis and various peripheral products are highly sought after, which can be described as heavyweight Internet celebrities and popular all over the world.
From the game mascot to the real Kumamoto Bear, the mascot can be said to be part of the anime culture, through the animation, games and other new culture to achieve branding, expand international influence, so that soft power becomes the driving force of economic growth - from this point of view, Japan's mascot culture ambitions are not small.
Japan, where mascot culture is flourishing, also has a confusing behavior, and in April this year, the Japanese government officially decided to discharge nuclear wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear power plant into the ocean. At the same time, in order to dispel the panic and vigilance of the people, the Reconstruction Agency, which is in charge of post-disaster reconstruction and nuclear accident handling, made a bold decision: a video and poster promoting "Tritium and nuclear wastewater are safe" were published on the official website on the same day. In the video, tritium turns into a green mascot. Finally, under the pressure of public opinion, the Revival Hall removed the video on the shelves on the evening of the 14th, stopped the poster distribution plan, and said that it would redesign it.
As a mascot cultural power that relies on mascots such as Kumamoto Kuma and Hikone to save Japan, it seems that these mascots have become less and less important as the culture of game mascots has declined. People take photos with the Olympic mascot, not only can promote and promote the Olympic Games, derivative souvenirs can more or less drive the economy, the Tokyo Olympic Organizing Committee on the mascot publicity does not pay attention to, may also indicate that the Japanese mascot culture is going downhill, once saved japan's mascot, has also been left behind.
Of course, it may also be that the Tokyo Olympic Organizing Committee is indeed too poor, after all, there have been enough scandals in this Olympic Games, and the lack of attention to the Olympic mascot may not be a big deal. Well, to be optimistic, through the spiraling law of natural dialectics, we may be able to see mascot cultures such as Sonic and Mario return to the embrace of video games in the future, looking forward.