We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

I think it’s a little complicated. The core of the issue may well be that while the mascot sort of thing goes over well in Japan, it doesn’t by itself sell the games and maybe it never did. I was recently reading an interview featuring the guys who were responsible for making sure various PlayStation characters would have a successful design in Japan; one of them mentioned (this was c. 2005~2006) Sonic was more famous as an apparel character than as a video game mascot! (Sony was having the same issue with Toro.) And that the Sonic games caught on in the West before they caught on in Japan. And that by that time Crash was no longer that popular in Japan (they were more convinced that they had more success “growing up” Jak and Ratchet as gamers got older). And that the below-replacement birth rate in Japan was slowly killing the market for cute kid stuff, so they envied Nintendo’s ability to keep kids engaged with Mario (might explain a bit about why Nintendo hasn’t moved much since). Lots of stuff.

Just thought that’d be a bit appropriate to mention, since that seems to be about the time they left Nintendo as the only game in town on that front.

(It was a little disorganized, due to being a mostly uncut interview, but maybe one day I ought to talk shop with good character designers myself....)