Bubsy

Michael Berlyn had spent years designing adventure games and was burned out on them when he saw Sonic the Hedgehog. He played it for most of his waking hours for a week, then set out to do his own version, and Accolade, then tangled in a lawsuit with Sega, wanted a mascot of its own. Development began in December 1991; a Genesis version planned for September 1992 slipped while the Sega case played out. Director John Skeel's brief was a game "as fast as Sonic and as deep as Mario." The voice was Brian Silva's, sped up in the studio; the catchphrase was the team's own running joke. Nintendo's content rules turned a catnip hazard into banana peels, and a December 1992 pizza-and-soda playtest with kids from near Accolade's San Jose office added secret tunnels to the first level.

Bubsy in: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind, the title a pun on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, shipped for the Super NES in May 1993 and the Genesis in July: sixteen levels, nine lives, and Woolies from the planet Rayon stealing the world's yarn, which mattered because Bubsy owned the world's largest yarn-ball collection. The marketing was enormous. A costumed Bubsy leaped out of a sack at the January 1993 Consumer Electronics Show, Electronic Gaming Monthly handed him "Most Hype for a Character of 1993," and Berlyn later said he had never been attached to anything with that kind of financial backing. Reviews were generally favorable; GamePro liked the personality and non-linear levels and faulted the slippery momentum, and the game won a Parents' Choice Award. A Taco Bell-sponsored cartoon pilot, "What Could Possibly Go Wrong?", aired over Thanksgiving 1993 and was never picked up.

Bubsy II arrived in October 1994, and then came Bubsy 3D for the PlayStation in 1996, released into the shadow of Super Mario 64. Its reception was bad enough to shelve the series for two decades, and Berlyn, who eventually left the industry, called it one of his greatest failures. But the internet loves a fallen mascot. The 2010s turned Bubsy into a running joke and then a cult, the rights bounced from Infogrames to Tommo to Billionsoft, which released The Woolies Strike Back in 2017, and Atari, owner again since 2023, put out a Purrfect Collection of the first four games in 2025 and a new Bubsy 4D in 2026. What could possibly go wrong.