Wednesday, March 30, 2022

Putting the EEE! in Enix

I was looking up something or other on Google Images, and this abstract figure presumed to be Enix's first mascot appeared. Is it a crudely drawn robot brought to life in a shareware paint program? A discarded drawing from Hungarian animation studio Klasky-Csupo? A random background character in a Dire Straights video? I'm still not sure, but since I had to see it, now so do you.

image from Giant Bomb

I asked around on the Talking Time forums, and one member insisted that it was part of a promotion to encourage hobbyist programmers to submit their games to Enix. Another guessed that it was a digital man inside your computer who handles all the calculations; a sort of number-crunching ghost in the machine which makes your games come to life. Finally, someone observed that whatever it was, it looked like it was caught in the middle of a bowel movement. Come to think of it, it does look like it's squatting, and that circle it's clutching in its spindly pixel arm could be an extra large roll of toilet paper...

Whatever this thing is or happens to be doing, Enix's corporate successor Square-Enix isn't eager to discuss it. Actually, there's a lot of stuff Enix did back in the 1980s that Square-Enix would like to pretend never happened, including the computer game Lolita Syndrome. I'll let the Wikipedia entry explain that one for me, but whatever you're already thinking, it's worse than that.

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