The mascots
The mascots are the characters that appear in the upper right corner of the site. The first images were added to the site as part of the launch of OCR v4 on May 23, 2004. As of February 3, 2015, there are 178 mascot images.
The majority of the mascots were chosen by djpretzel, and he decides when new ones will be added. The project team writes, edits, and uploads bios, but does not add new mascots.
The project
The articles
Each of the mascots has at least one article, also referred to as a bio. Princess Zelda and Solid Snake have more than one image, but only one article, which means that clicking either of their images will redirect you to the same page.
The articles were written with a few things in mind:
- to provide the reader with an introduction - not a full, detailed history that reveals everything about the mascot.
- to list the sources used when writing them.
- to write something that will still be true in the future. As a result, the bios may not be up-to-date in a few years.
- to keep spoilers at a minimum.
The Darkstalker mascots had special treatment because the one who wrote them, The Coop, posted all of his articles in a very short period of time, before anyone had a chance to tell him about the guidelines. Considering the amount of work put in and the bios' outstanding quality, we added his first set of articles as bonus articles.
Each mascot has a list of appearances. We initially wanted to list every game that a character appears in, but for some characters (e.g. Mario), the list got ridiculously long, and so we had to settle for the following:
- all games that this character appears in, with ReMixes on this site, are listed. If we missed any, tell us.
- some characters have been in very few or none of the games that have ReMixes on this site. In those cases, we have added a few games to their lists for reference.
For more information, read the Mascot Project Guidelines.
Origins / History
DarkeSword turned a thread titled "The guy on top", started by Dafydd, into a project by appointing him the project coordinator and changing the thread title. The first post, now edited an enormous number of times, originally read:
I was just thinking about the game characters that show up on the right on the site header... half of them I don't know who they are. Wouldn't it be great if you could click them and end up at a page (hosted here) that gave you some quick facts about who they are, their game appearances, life stories etc.?
... and the rest is history.
Credits / Thanks
Quite a few people have been involved in this project. We'd like to thank:
- The 27 writers (for writing the articles) and 3 editors among them (for clean-up):
- Arek the Absolute
- Arrow
- Bummer
- Chernabogue
- chez dogulov
- Daethar
- Dafydd (project coordinator, editor)
- Darklink42
- FenixDown
- Kal aMari
- Less Ashamed Of Self
- Level 99
- Linearity (former editor)
- Liontamer
- Miletus
- Mirby
- Nonamer
- OmegaMe
- Polo (editor)
- Psychotic Ninja
- Rexy
- Spunodi
- Tensei
- The Coop
- The Damned
- The Instrument of GAWD
- watkinzez
- DarkeSword (for early guidelines and support)
- Liontamer (for late guidelines and support, as well as Wiki integration instructions)
- djpretzel (for the Photoshopped mascots, the coding to click on them to access the articles, and of course OCR :P)
- The many supporters (for questions, corrections, and rooting for us)
Thank you for reading!
The full list of mascots is available below.
