The Sega Master System failed in America for several reasons: it had few high-profile releases, many of its impressive titles were released only overseas, the marketing of the system was lazy, and, of course, Nintendo had a madly oppressive grip on the U.S. video game industry. The lack of a strong system mascot may not have been a major factor, but it couldn't have helped. In fact, some don't even remember that the Master System had a mascot, or that said mascot was a riceball-gobbling monkey-boy who went by the unexplained name of Alex Kidd.

Alex Kidd

Company: Sega

Appearances:

Alex Kidd in Miracle World (Master System, 1986) Alex Kidd: High Tech World (Master System, 1987) BMX Trial: Alex Kidd (Master System, 1987) Alex Kidd: Lost Stars (Arcade, Master System, 1988) Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle (Arcade, Genesis, 1989) Alex Kidd in Shinobi World (Master System, 1990)

This unassuming semi-simian hero debuted on the Master System in 1986 with Alex Kidd in Miracle World. Arriving a year after Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. , Sega's title took a similar path through side-scrolling stages, with some innovations. Alex had a motorcycle, a motorboat, and other vehicles to ride, and instead of jumping on his foes, he simply punched them. If Alex Kidd had become an icon in Mario's place, perhaps generations of action-platform games would feature more fisticuffs and less head-bopping. And a volcano wouldn't have destroyed ancient Crete.

Yet Miracle World wasn't enough to make its hero a genre legend. It was a fun game, but it didn't quite stick in one's psyche. Super Mario Bros. and its sequels were gifted with a memorable and amusingly strange selection of living mushrooms, evil turtles, and near-psychedelic dream worlds. Miracle World had Alex fighting fish, birds, and jumping lizards, with Alex himself a shade too generic to impress at a glance. Lacking any characteristics other than earnest pluck, he was a remnant of the Pac-Man era, when characters of any sort were still a novelty, and game protagonists didn't need personality or promotion to stand out.

Promotion, however, was essential in the Mario age, and promotion was what Alex lacked most. Sega was strangely hesitant to give him the spotlight, in either advertising or game prominence. Miracle World would have made an excellent pack-in for the Master System, but instead of countering Nintendo's action-platformer with one of their own, Sega went with their decent yet repetitive motorcycle racer Hang-On and the forgettable gun game Safari Hunt. And a built-in game, Snail Maze. It was a novel strategy, perhaps, but the results were no competition for Super Mario Bros.

To Sega's credit, Alex had more games in his name than any other Master System character. Miracle World was followed by the unorthodox adventure High-Tech World (really an altered version of the anime-based game Anmitsu Hime), a port of the earlier arcade game The Lost Stars, and a BMX title that, strangely enough, wasn't released in America, even though it would have been some competition for Nintendo's Excitebike. Of the Alex Kidd sequels on the SMS, Alex Kidd in Shinobi World is perhaps the most interesting, as it throws Sega's would-be mascot into a simulacrum of the Shinobi setting. In an amusing stroke of foreshadowing, Shinobi World's first boss was almost named Mari-Oh, an early trace of the Nintendo-directed mockery that Sega would unleash later, when a system called the Genesis rolled out.

High-Tech World apparently involves selective elephantitis of the hands.

Despite this subtle stab, Alex was never Mario's equal. The Sega Master System's ad campaigns, managed for a time by Tonka, didn't grasp the importance of a mascot, and American illustrations of Alex did him few favors. On the box art for The Lost Stars and High-Tech World, he's an apple-cheeked horror who resembles a mouselike Alfred E. Neuman more than a resolute kid monkey. And without any strong advertising or appealing art for Alex, there couldn't be any merchandise. Nintendo put Mario, Link, and other NES game characters on all sorts of products, but for Alex, there would be no hackneyed Saturday morning cartoons, no pajamas festooned with his image, and certainly no marshmallow-strewn cereal in a divided box that he would have shared with, say, the Golvellius hero.

Alex's didn't get a chance as a true mascot until 1990, when the Sega Master System II, a smaller and simpler revision of the original, was released with Miracle World as its built-in game. It did little good. The Genesis was Sega's focus at that point, and the Master System's already marginalized share of the market vanished quickly.

Alex's marvelous adventure of whimsical wonder failed to catch on among teenage Genesis owners.

Alex exited the gaming industry soon after, though at least he managed to escape the Master System. A port of his second arcade game, Alex Kidd and the Enchanted Castle, hit the Genesis in 1989. Arguably most similar to his original Miracle World outing, The Enchanted Castle was a fairly enjoyable action/platformer with amusing “jan-ken-pon” matches within standard levels. It was not, however, particularly new territory for Alex, and the game's cute tone didn't fit in with the grittier arcade ports and sports titles in the Genesis stable. Sega pitched the new console partly as a grown-up alternative to Nintendo's sanitized system, and the cheerful, bike-riding Alex Kidd had no part to play here, not even as a Shinobi cosplayer.

The Enchanted Castle would be Alex's only game in the Genesis library. In 1991, Sega unveiled Sonic the Hedgehog, who had been designed from the start as an appealing, marketable, and, to borrow a despised bit of corporate phrase, “edgy” mascot. The Kidd was thrown aside without ceremony. Sega hasn't completely forgotten the monkey-like lad, though. The company recently announced the Sega Ages 2500 series, a line of classic remakes for the PlayStation 2. Among the titles up for release is Alex Kidd in Miracle World. No street date has been put forth, but such a remake would be a fun endeavor as well as a look back at Alex Kidd, his mascot potential, and all that might have been.