![]() ![]() It was a genre-defying satire of everything and it was a cult classic. It helped that the game was good! Somewhere between a roguelike and an action game, you had to help the aliens search for parts to rebuild their ship and escape. OK, its two main characters were “ alien rappers” and wore sunglasses, high-tops and backwards baseball caps to prove it, but it was just as a parody of the cultural appropriation that was so common at the time. The difference between Earl & Toejam and Cool Spot was that Toejam & Earl was weird, funny and made fun of Earth culture in the nineties. Toejam & Earl was a game from a similar time that got a lot of the ingredients for cool just right. It was praised by critics and fans for its great gameplay, clean graphics and smooth animation… but not for its cool! Weird but Cool What was even worse was that he could only collect power-ups by collecting letters that spelled out his parent company’s name!Īlthough Cool Spot might not have been as cool as his name would make you think, he was the star of a pretty solid platform game. That’s a pretty thin way to try to make a character cool! It really didn’t help that Cool Spot was a mascot for 7-Up. The main character, Cool Spot himself, was a big red spot with sunglasses and sneakers. If you’re old enough, you might remember Cool Spot on the Genesis and the SNES. There are times when games companies try to force the public to think that their games are cool. It needs to have a voice and say something about our culture. For a game to be cool, it needs to have a sense of style and it needs to take risks. You might well think that Football Manager and Train Simulator are great games, but you probably don’t think that they’re especially cool. ![]() That doesn’t mean every game is a cool video game though! Not even every good game is cool. You probably already think that it’s possible for games to be cool, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this! These days, video games are huge and are definitely part of the mainstream culture, with as good a claim to being cool as anything you can see on a screen. Video games were seen as an antisocial, lonely hobby. In the early days there were definitely no cool video games! Computers in general were something that was seen as a nerdy, even unhealthy thing to be interested in. It’s a long history… and a cool one! Cool Video Games It was the legendary Miles Davis album Birth of the Cool that pushed the style to the attention of the public and the rest is history. You probably don’t associate the word cool with jazz, but that’s what it originally described-a new kind of relaxed jazz that was very different from the harder, more aggressive style of the music that had come before. dates back to just after World War II, so it’s already over seventy years old! As Cool As… Jazz? ![]() Using “cool” to mean stylish, relaxed, fashionable etc. You might think that’s a brave prediction! After all, who can really know what words will still be cool ten years from now? But the word “cool” really does seem to have a lot more staying power than all of its slang rivals. Because the word cool is, for lack of a better word, cool! And in the future, when we’ve stopped saying that things are “dope” or “fire” or “sick”, we’ll still be calling them cool. While we might not call things “rad” or “funky” or “groovy” or “hip” anymore, we still call them cool. Cool is one of those words that will be around forever.
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