Back in the ‘Caring Nineties’, when video games had blue skies, animals had a pretty good time. The purpose of Sonic the Hedgehog, perhaps the single greatest video game icon, was to liberate an assortment of unfeasibly wide-eyed woodland creatures from the laboratories of the evil Dr Robotnik. How marvellous we all felt as we finally navigated the platforms, ramps, and bouncy springs of a level, and jumped on the release button of a futuristic Huntingdon Life Sciences, seeing a flock of 11-pixel-wide bunnies scamper off to the Green Hill Zone.
It wasn’t long after that that we all became Ecco the Dolphin, a mad trip of a game, where you swam about, occasionally blunting your nose on bits of coral, and trying to decipher what cryptic clues like ‘There is a song in the ocean like a trodden-on crab’ meant. We all gave up a third of the way into level two, and Sega nearly went out of business.