Awesome Possum... Kicks Dr. Machino's Butt

Awesome Possum... Kicks Dr. Machino's Butt is Tengen's 1993 attempt to build a Sonic of its own for the Sega Genesis: a fast animal mascot with attitude, this time carrying an environmental message. The hero is a possum, the villain is Dr. Machino, whose robots are wrecking nature, and instead of rings you collect trash — cans and bottles scattered through the stages, with an extra life for every fifty pieces picked up.

The structure is straight platforming. You run and jump through levels that map onto the era's ecological worries — a rainforest under deforestation, the ocean, the Arctic, a giant landfill — bounce on Machino's robots to break them open, and free the animals they have captured. Between stages the game quizzes you on ecology: multiple-choice questions about recycling, the ozone layer and endangered species, with bonus points for correct answers. As a snapshot of 1993, when environmentalism ran through pop culture from Captain Planet to FernGully, it is a remarkable time capsule.

The craft is where it falls apart. The possum controls sluggishly, jumps float, collisions are vague, and the level design wanders rather than flows. Worse, the hero talks. Tengen was proud of cramming an unusual amount of digitized speech onto the cartridge, but hearing „Awesome!“ for the fiftieth time turns the game's flagship feature into the first thing you want to mute.

Measured against Sonic, the game it openly challenged, it feels slow and clumsy; measured against mid-tier platformers of its day, it still comes up short. It stands mostly as proof that a mascot cannot be willed into existence by marketing — yet its earnest belief that a video game could help save the planet gives it a period charm all its own.

If you want to see this odd chapter of mascot history for yourself, it runs in your browser on oldgame.cz.