As we've seen, it can be hard for a mascot for a company that only wanted a mascot because all the cool kids have mascots, Mom, c'mooooon! The cycle of overexposure, shovelware, and neglect can be a cruel one. But let us not forget the others: the Mascots Of Companies That Already Have Mascots. Weep for these poor lost, fair reader, weep for them, and despair.

Or you could do a barrel roll. That works too.

See, Nintendo has been around for a long time, as video games go. They've got the problem opposite that of the new studio that wants mascot power and so puts the character's face on sub-par games. They've got characters coming out of games that could be mascots on their own, if it wasn't for that pesky Mario.

No not him.

I meant this guy.

Though the understandable confusion clearly means the problem is epidemic.

Fox McCloud was born because Nintendo had some new tech, and needed a game to put it in: Starfox, for the SNES, was one of the first games, on a console at least, to have objects built out of polygons rather than being two-dimensional sprites. Shigeru Miyamoto, who we've mentioned before, happened to go to a shrine of the Shinto god Inari, who takes the form of a fox, and which is famous for it's long walks covered with lots of arches. This, reportedly, gave him an idea for a game about a fox that flew through arches, and also inspired Fox's red scarf.

You can see the family resemblance.

The story is so simple as to be archetypal: a renowned warrior is killed by an evil overlord, and the warrior's son goes out to avenge his father. In this case the warlord is Andross, from the Greek word meaning 'human,' a power-mad monkey who believes himself the evolutionary superior of all the other spacefaring woodland creatures. So it's a bit like Gundam, if they'd reused the cast of Bambi.

The gameplay was impressive for it's time, the music was good, and the characters were memorable: Peppy Hare, the surrogate father figure, has become a long-running joke on the internet for his line 'Do a Barrel Roll,' and Wolf O'Donnel, Fox's rival, has his own memetic line.

All the more tragic is that Wolf is far sexier.

So what went wrong? Well, maybe you've heard of a game called Smash Brothers. Nintendo's got so many iconic characters, any one of which has enough mascot power to themselves be the face of the company, that they were able to make a game solely about all those characters hitting eachother with baseball bats and paper fans and exploding potatoes. A game that's had two sequels. With a triumphant choral theme. In Latin. That's a lot of star power for one poor spacefox to compete with.

You can barely even see him way at the back there.

And so Starfox has been passed from in-house studio to third part developer to third party developer. The results have been... mixed, at best. Still, Fox McCloud has his fans, to this day, and they're very enthusiastic. Perhaps a little too much. Seriously, don't do an image search, you will not be able to unsee what you see.