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

41. Mr. Driller

Hello Kitty. We all know the name. We all think of something when we hear the words.

"Hello Kitty." It calls to mind either the image of a small child meeting a stray cat in a neighborhood alleyway, or a cute, clean, white cartoon cat with a bow in its head and a dress on its body.

Hello Kitty is clean Japanese character design sensibility at its purest. Hello Kitty was designed neither as a comic book character, nor an anime heroine, nor a videogame icon. She was designed as a character image for stationery, cosmetics, and clothing.

In very much the same way, Namco's Mr. Driller could have been a character image. Classic, with smooth, rounded body segments, Mr. Driller is a hardworking little guy who navigates mazes full of baddies, using his drill to clear away color-coded in a race against time, and move on to the next stage. Add the fierceness of multiplayer combat to this addicting puzzle gameplay, and you come up with a character who could have been anything else, and ended up being so much more.

40. Kiddy Kong (Donkey Kong Country 3)

In Rare's Battletoads, we play as Zitz and Rash, trudging forth through twelve insanely difficult levels to rescue a certain princess and our friend Pimple. In the Gameboy sequel, the tables are turned halfway: we're now Zitz and Pimple, going forth to rescue Rash and the princess. In the sequel Battletoads in Battlemaniacs, we've got Rash and Pimple rescuing Zitz and the princess.

Rare's Donkey Kong Country is about Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong rescuing Donkey Kong's hoard of bananas. Donkey Kong Country 2 is about Diddy Kong and Dixie Kong rescuing Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong and Donkey Kong's hoard of bananas. Donkey Kong Country 3 is about Dixie Kong and newcomer Kiddy Kong rescuing Donkey Kong, Diddy Kong, and the hoard of bananas.

It doesn't take a rocket-scientist, a brain surgeon, or a computer programmer to see the pattern here. Rare was in a storyline rut until they invented big, blue-shirted, fuzzy ape Kiddy Kong. They took their game out of the jungle, and put it into something of a Mark-Twain-inspired backwaterish Mississippi setting. Kiddy Kong -- a large monkey who is still a baby -- was the last new hero Rare introduced on the Super Nintendo. He was a rebirth for the developer, who then went on to crank out the mature Conker the Squirrel and the saintly Banjo-Kazooie bear-bird combination. Kiddy represents a buckling down and maturing up for Rare, who finally stepped up to the challenge of developing a licensed game with Goldeneye, had that license torn away, and eventually followed up their success with Perfect Dark, a better game than Goldeneye ever was.

For breaking Rare out of their dark storyline rut and into the clear skies of the future, we at insert credit salute one lovable little ape called Kiddy Kong.

39. Paul (Tekken 3)

Back in 1992, when Capcom sued Data East over Fighter's History, a game they claimed borrowed too closely from the character designs of the Street Fighter II series, the question was asked: how original, really, can a fighting game character get?

Stories in fighting games have always been something of a fifth wheel. People playing Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution in a Tokyo arcade couldn't care less about their fighters' motivations; it's all about the play, and the absorption into the game they, as players, feel. Namco knows this, and they've always aimed to change it. With Tekken, they got their feet wet. With Tekken 2, they got their feet wetter. Soul Blade saw the inclusion of a historical background for each character. Tekken 3 took all its original characters into the distant future, aged them, and made them tougher. Heihachi's hair was now frosted. Marshall Law was now dead and gone -- his copycat son Forest Law now took his place. Kazuya of Tekken 2 was dead; the new Jin Kazama, his look-a-like, replaced him. The only character outside now-more-stately Heihachi to grow older and visibly bear witness to all this coming of age was Paul.

There's been traditions in place for a long time in fighting games. You've always got to have a Shotokan karate master. You've always got to have a motorcycle fetishist. And you've always got to have a guy with crazy flattop hair. Well -- Paul exemplifies the non-laziness with which the Namco designers address their character design: he's a flattopped, motorcycle-riding, shotokan-karate-uniform-wearing fighter with a deep, tragic plot. And his FMV ending shows him getting pulled over while speeding on his bike -- a careful, more mature variant of his speeding-off-into-the-sunset ending of Tekken 2. This becomes Namco's mantra: to revise your own work, imitate it. The sincerest form of flattery is imitation. The sincerest form of imitation, then, to Namco, is combination -- and by golly, it works.

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