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Video games

Arcade mascots, platform heroes and the faces of modern consoles.

Ash Ketchum spent twenty-five years being ten years old and losing.

Bowser was designed as an ox.

Donkey Kong was a rescue operation.

Geralt of Rivia

Geralt is a monster hunter who keeps discovering the monster is not the problem.

Kirby was drawn as a placeholder.

Kratos is one of the few video game characters to be substantially rewritten and improved by his own sequel.

Lara Croft was the first female protagonist to headline a blockbuster action game.

Link is deliberately empty, and the design is explicit about why.

Luigi began as a palette swap.

Almost every distinctive feature of Mario's design was a solution to a hardware limitation.

Master Chief is a helmet the player wears, and Bungie was deliberate about keeping it that way.

Toru Iwatani set out to design an arcade game that women would want to play.

Pikachu was not designed to be the face of anything.

Peach's history tracks the games industry's slow renegotiation of what a princess character is for.

The series is named after her and for most of its history she was not playable in it.

Metroid's ending in 1986 removed the armour and revealed the bounty hunter inside was a woman.

Sonic the Hedgehog

Sonic was engineered as a competitor.

Yoshi was an idea Miyamoto had been trying to implement since the first Super Mario Bros.

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