STACK #188 June 2020

GAMING FEATURE

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SCREEN SPIRIT With hundreds of games I

'90 s GAMES

released every month, a character has to be truly special to become a star of pop culture.The 1990s saw many games released, and below you’ll find our choices for the ten most iconic game characters to have made their debut in the decade. Words Amy Flower

and those incredibly powerful thighs - Chun-Li has gone on to become one of the series’ most popular and recognisable characters, featuring in most Street Fighter II sequels and even her very own movie. DUKENUKEM Debut: 1991 Duke Nukem - PC It’s hard to believe, but the bigmouthed, hyper-macho, Army of Darkness and They Live -quoting action hero that we know today started life as quite the silent type, aggrieved at his favourite soap opera being messed with by a mad scientist. Since the steroid injection, he’s

YOSHI Debut: 1990 Super Mario World - Super NES He may have debuted as a sidekick to

Nintendo’s Mario and Luigi, but there was no way that this little dinosaur was going to play second fiddle for very long. Indeed, his rapid rise to popularity saw the sequel Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island carrying his name. In following years Yoshi played with everything from cookies to physics to arts and crafts, as well as appearing in a cameo capacity in myriad other games from Nintendo, even when Mario was nowhere to be found. CHUN-LI Debut: 1991

SONIC Debut: 1991 Sonic the Hedgehog - Mega Drive

Street Fighter II - Arcade Thankfully it’s no big deal nowadays, but when vengeful undercover Interpol agent Chun-Li debuted in Capcom’s soon-to-be smash hit brawler, it marked the first time that a playable female fighter featured in a mainstream arcade release. With her expert martial arts skills –

While SEGA’s main competitor, Nintendo, had the versatile Mario, their Alex Kidd just wasn’t cutting it in the mascot stakes. Enter Mr Needlemouse - soon renamed Sonic the Hedgehog - and a gaming legend was born. Not only did Sonic help SEGA’s Mega Drive compete with the Super Nintendo, he quickly gained enormous traction amongst gamers as a more edgy character than that of the competition. Sonic is still very much alive in the games sphere, and even has his own movie…

starred in over a dozen games, the most notorious of which was Duke Nukem Forever , which finally escaped a troubled development in 2011. John Cena was to play Duke in a movie, but that’s been canned. Damn!

10 JUNE 2020

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