the insert credit cold fifty: videogame icons: compiled by tim rogers -- with a foreword by chris kohler, fulbright scholar

11. Super Mario

Talk about working within the realm of your limitations. Nintendo and Shigeru Miyamoto's Super Mario -- who made his first appearance as "Jumpman" in 1983's Donkey Kong -- was designed with the sole purpose of being visible. He wears white gloves because, otherwise, we wouldn't be able to see his hands. He has suspenders because, otherwise, we wouldn't be able to see the movement of his arms. He wears a hat because hair would have been too difficult to animate. He has a mustache because it's more visible than a mouth.

That this character went on to become beloved speaks volumes for the cleverness of his game's design; that we continue to see this character pop up in game after game says something else. Sure, we've grown accustomed to him. Sure, we love his games -- it's just that videogame systems are not, by nature, weak anymore. Yet we continue to see him in 3D games like Super Mario RPG, Super Mario 64, and Super Mario Sunshine. Super Mario, our beloved good friend, is at once both a memory of times gone by and a symbol, through and through, of the mascot sickness that has plagued videogames from the beginning.

10. Squall Leonhart

There comes a great revelation following the newly computer-animated ending of Final Fantasy VI's PSOne incarnation. Wowed and breathless from seeing our beloved characters, for the first time, in jaw-dropping 3D, we're suddenly snapped back into the text-one-menus world of the game itself. We're being asked if we'd like to save a system file. We let our eyes focus following the sensory barrage of full-motion-video. And there, standing above the text box, talking to us, is Final Fantasy VIII's hero, Squall Leonhart. He's in little-sprite form, looking much like he belongs in Final Fantasy VI. We see him, and we narrow our eyes at him, and we realize: he's made it. Those who held skepticism when they beheld Squall's Gunblade -- a sword/gun hybrid -- for the first time, those put off by his I-don't-care attitude, those who couldn't buy his little love story: take one look at sprite Squall at the end of the Final Fantasy Anthology edition of Final Fantasy VI, and you'll realize, deep down inside, just how endearing a young man he was all along. He's fought for what he's gotten, and that he's done so straight-facedly, that he's done it as one of us makes his climb all the sweeter. He's made it to the top of the RPG character heap. He's not going anywhere -- except maybe a few welcome cameos in glorious 3D, a la Kingdom Hearts.

9. Goemon

Your typical poser-hardcore gamer will probably tell you that Final Fantasy VI was the beginning of mature themes in videogames. Well, they don't know what they're talking about. Just because Final Fantasy VI includes, at one point, a single mother, and deals with themes of love, amnesia, and recovery of memory doesn't mean it's necessarily more "mature" than other videogames. All inclusion of a single mother does is make it more like a movie. What's the point of that?

You know a form of entertainment has reached legend status when parodies start to pop up. And there's no parody better than a Konami parody. Over the years, they've made side-scrolling shooters (Gradius) and even parodies of those side-scrolling shooters (Parodius), the second installment of which stars none other than a superhero-flying version of Konami's own master of parody himself, Goemon.

Based on old ukiyoe ("Floating World") wood-block prints -- often used as kabuki advertisements in the Edo period -- the wig-wearing Goemon first appeared in Konami's 1986 arcade/Famicom title Mr. Goemon -- a rather standard side-scrolling platformer. He went on to star as the hero of the Ganbare! series, which parodies everything from traditional 8-bit videogames, 16-bit videogames (Ganbare! Goemon 3 features a Magitek-Armor-clad walk across a desert, which mirrors Final Fantasy VI's opening scene; its title screen is lifted straight from Contra III: The Alien Wars, only with a traditional Japanese skyline in place of a futuristic one), and American popular culture (Ganbare! Goemon 2's villain is an American looking to break into the Japanese kabuki scene) in the most anachronistic ways possible (Ganbare! Goemon lets you play Gradius in an arcade in feudal Japan; the aforementioned American kabuki actor comes to Japan at a time when America didn't exist). The result: would be nothing, if not for Konami's trademark technical tenacity. Each Ganbare! game is a tight, perfectly-rounded exercise in platforming.

And besides, we've just got to give props to a character who's appeared in more than ten games, once as a kabuki actor, many times as a ninja, and once as a cyborg ninja in the future, to a guy who pilots a giant robot -- Goemon Impact -- made in his image, a guy who's fought bunny samurais in a palace full of perilous pits of tempura batter from the back of a mousemobile. Even if Konami of America once tried to rename you "Kid Ying," you're still cool with us. Go on -- Ganbare, Goemon.

[even closer: 8-6]