Cool Spot

The early 1990s were the era of the mascot game, when Chester Cheetah and Domino's Noid got their own cartridges, and the 7 Up Spot was the one that turned out to be good. Cool Spot came out of Virgin Games' American studio in April 1993 on the Sega Genesis, with a Super NES version and ports to the Master System, Game Gear, Game Boy, Amiga and DOS following. Programmer David Perry had just come off Global Gladiators, a McDonald's-licensed game that Virgin's Stephen Clarke-Willson later called the practice run for this one, and the Cool Spot team was tiny: eight people, including animators Mike Dietz and Shawn McLean, designers David Bishop and Bill Anderson, producer Cathie Bartz-Todd and composer Tommy Tallarico. Perry has said the coding took about three months and the whole job about half a year.

The game itself was simple and unusually pretty. Spot jumped, clung to things and threw soda bubbles in any direction, and each level asked him to collect a quota of little red spots before he could free a caged fellow Spot at the end. His health meter was his own face, slumping further forward with every hit. The bonus stage hid letters that spelled UNCOLA, 7 Up's slogan, and each one bought a continue. The animation, the backgrounds and Tallarico's soundtrack were what people remembered; British magazines put it on best-of lists for years afterward, and Complex was still ranking it among the best SNES games in 2018.

For Virgin the deal was the point. "Spot was the greatest deal ever," Stephen Clarke-Willson, the company's vice president of product development, said later. "For something like $.25 a unit, we got access to $10 million in advertising by Seven-Up at Christmas time." The game sold about a million copies, Perry's team went straight on to the Genesis Aladdin, and a sequel, Spot Goes to Hollywood, arrived in 1995. For everyone else it was a moment when a soda commercial was, briefly, one of the best games in the house.