The Super Play Top 100 was the 1990’s SNES culture magazine’s final ranking of the platform’s catalogue mere months before the publication ended. This is the first in a regular monthly feature here, taking a look back at each title, how they fared back then and how they stand up today.
In the early '90s, video games were going through their rebellious teenage phase. Everyone wanted a mascot: Nintendo had Mario, Sega had Sonic, and 7 Up—yes, the lemon-lime soft drink—said, “Hold my carbonation,” and gave us… a red dot. With sunglasses. Who shoots bubbles with the click of his fingers. Enter: Cool Spot.
Cool Spot was released in 1994 in the UK, several months after the successful Sega Mega Drive version. Both were developed by Virgin Games, who, in a move both bold, bizarre, and from a marketing perspective quite complicated, decided to turn 7 Up’s red dot mascot into a platforming hero. Because when life gives you lemons… you make a video game, apparently.
Now, most corporate mascot games were as fun as watching a tax seminar in slow motion (Chester Cheetah, anyone?). But Cool Spot was different. This wasn’t just an advert you could accidentally control with a controller—this is a legitimately fun game. It was designed by David Perry, who later went on to create Earthworm Jim, proving once and for all that weirdness can pay off.
As the title suggests, you play as the titular Cool Spot, the living punctuation mark with more swagger than Sonic the Hedgehog at a chilli dog convention. He jumps, he rescues other Spots from cages for reasons that are never explained (were they arrested for brand infringement?). Armed with only carbonated bubble blasts and righteous attitude, he navigates beaches with litter and deck chairs, toy rooms that violate several health and safety regulations, and docks filled with crabs, which might be a metaphor for capitalism. Cool Spot attacks by shooting the aforementioned fizzy bubbles from his hand—because why not—and the goal is to collect red dots (meta!) and free your trapped dot brethren. The health system is rather unique and brilliant: instead of hearts or health bars, Spot’s facial expression at the top left of the screen slowly changes from cool and confident to “I just saw the sales forecast for New Coke.” If it droops too low from too many hits - game over.
In the UK, Cool Spot was not the advertising mascot for 7 Up, which led to the omission of anything 7 Up within the UK release. The UK’s mascot was the also cool Fido Dido, a doodle drawing of a shorts and t-shirt wearing teenager that quickly became a cartoon-starring, clothes-selling brand of his own. He would ultimately replace Cool Spot completely, but Fido never got his own video game.
Cool Spot is the star of the show, but from a video game perspective the animation is the star here: Cool Spot moves like a dream. He’s got more frames of animation than a Pixar short. The controls are tight and responsive. You actually feel like you're in complete control of a tiny, red, unblinking dot with swagger. Believe it or not, Cool Spot wasn’t just a good game for a soft drink advert—it was just a good game, and still holds up pretty well today.
Now the Soundtrack, credited to Tommy Tallarico, a guy I now place doubt on any music credit, is regardless a delight. Funky, jazzy, and very “I’m-about-to-skateboard-through-a-soft-drink-commercial” energy. However, it just doesn’t come across as well as the Mega Drive/Genesis version, which for me is a rare occurrence of the SNES not scoring as well as its rival. There are also some compositions missing from the Sega version which is even more baffling. The resolution of the SNES version also isn’t as fluid as its Sega counterpart, running at a slower frame rate but does however boast a more colourful aesthetic overall thanks to the superior colour palette of Nintendo’s machine.
Critics in 1993 were stunned by this new platforming hero. What should’ve been a shameless soft drink cash-in turned out to be one of the most enjoyable platformers of the 16-bit era. Super Play at the time said this:-
“Before Dave Perry was selling the cartoon rights to garden-based invertebrates for millions of dollars, he was designing platformers like this for Virgin. Its twist - and there has to be a twist, or the game's Just Another Platformer, right? -is Spot's size: he's a veritable Tom Thumb in the game world, making for a lengthy supply of size comparison japerings. The graphics are topper too, mind, and as a whole it stands as one of the few non-Mario platformers worth anything more than a passing glance”
It scored well across the board (82% on the basis of the above) and even made some year-end “best of” lists. Meanwhile, other mascot games like Cool Spot's distant cousin Pepsi Man were quietly asking for spare change behind the arcade. Maybe.
Even though he hasn’t starred in a game since the Clinton administration, Cool Spot left behind a fizzy legacy: it showed the world that a corporate mascot game could be good—great, even—if you just put in a little effort (and hired David Perry). Speaking of Dave, Cool Spot helped catapult Perry into video game royalty. Without Cool Spot, we might never have gotten Earthworm Jim, and then what would a 90s weirdos like me have played? Cool Spot was, and remains, a strange miracle: a platformer where a corporate icon becomes a charming, bubble-blasting hero. It’s like if the Pringles guy suddenly became an elite sniper—unexpected, but kind of awesome.
