Gex

Gex was developed and published by Crystal Dynamics, debuting on the 3DO on April 7, 1995. The premise was pure 90s: a couch-potato gecko named Gex gets sucked into his television by the villain Rez and has to fight through channel-surfing parody worlds — horror movies, kung fu flicks, cartoons — using his tail-whip and a gecko's knack for sticking to walls. What set him apart was the mouth: comedian Dana Gould both voiced Gex and wrote his stream of pop-culture one-liners, and critics singled the character out as one of the first game heroes whose personality actually landed. The game won Electronic Gaming Monthly's Game of the Month and was named best 3DO game of 1995 — and became a pack-in with later Panasonic 3DO consoles, making Gex the closest thing that doomed system had to a flagship mascot.

PlayStation and Saturn ports followed in December 1995, but the Gex most people remember is the PlayStation-era sequels. Gex: Enter the Gecko (February 1998) reinvented the series in 3D, with Gould recording a mountain of new quips — over 700 lines, far more than the Nintendo 64 cartridge version could even hold. Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko (March 1999) leaned all the way into the shtick, dressing Gex in per-level costumes and adding live-action mission briefings from 'Agent Xtra,' played by Baywatch's Marliece Andrada. The marketing was just as cheeky as the games, pitching Gex as gaming's smart-aleck answer to the cuddlier mascots.

And then it simply stopped. After Gex 3 there was never a plan for a fourth game, and the gecko quietly retired as the 90s mascot boom deflated. He lives on as a shorthand for that exact moment in gaming — when every publisher wanted its own attitude-loaded animal with a catchphrase, and for a few years a gecko doing Dana Gould material was a genuine PlayStation-aisle star.