The History of the Sonic Mascot Costume

[Badnik Mechanic 33,997]

 

For full disclosure, that's my video... now if a mod wants to move this to showcase, go ahead... but.... Why I'm posting this in SGD is because... I'm actually quite shocked at how much there is here of this piece of Sonic history and how poorly documented it is in some cases.

For over 27 years now, Sega have used official mascot costumes to help promote their games whilst you're probably familiar with the two modern Sonic ones which normally go to fan events and E3, you are probably not as familiar as the one off used Eggman, Cream or Werehog costume.

There's also a 1995 Classic Knuckles costume.... which only 1 photo exists of. Surely someone somewhere has another image of this!? 

Another thing I learnt whilst doing this... is due to Sega's structure back in the 90's... With Sega of Japan, Sega of America... and virtually every Country in Europe having it's own office, each region of Sega 'Europe' e.g. Sega London, Sega Italy , Sega Germany... All made their own costumes! And some were comically bad! The 1992 German costume is utterly horrendous. Yet the only media of it comes from an internal marketing video.... despite there being 50 costumes in the video!

We've got people here from all over the world, and I bet that in some of your regional videogame magazines, some of these lesser known costumes were used as promotional images in them. So lets find them and document them!

 

Check out the video if you're interested and want to see just how deep this rabbit hole goes. Because I bet there's more out there and I bet there's more and better video of some of these costumes. I can't believe there is only 4 seconds of the Sonic Adventure costumes and no footage at all of the Eggman costume.

[Nintenboi 42]

Badnik Mechanic, you should be ashamed. You forgot to mention these:

Shame on you!

[Badnik Mechanic 33,997]

Yeah yeah...

[Strong Guy 1,544]

Okay so I haven't watched the video, but I do have this image of a classic Sonic and Knuckles costume. The Knuckles REALLY intrigued me since I love pink Knuckles.

I think this is the same Knuckles that's in the thumbnail of that video. This picture was my header for a long time here. That said aside from this image and the one in that thumbnail, I have never heard of seen anything else about this elusive pink Knuckles mascot.

[Badnik Mechanic 33,997]

23 hours ago, Strong Guy said:

Okay so I haven't watched the video, but I do have this image of a classic Sonic and Knuckles costume. The Knuckles REALLY intrigued me since I love pink Knuckles.

I think this is the same Knuckles that's in the thumbnail of that video. This picture was my header for a long time here. That said aside from this image and the one in that thumbnail, I have never heard of seen anything else about this elusive pink Knuckles mascot.

I actually managed to find some video of this costume. It's extremely brief and it great quality.

But it seems the Knuckles costume was used at some of the old Sega roadshows and would often be used at the more big profile one.

One show in particular was the BBC Radio One Summer Roadshow event. 

3 of the Sega busses turned up to that one including the Sonic, Tails and Knuckles mascot, the brief clip shows them dancing on stage. 

 

I really need to get around to doing the 2nd sonic mascot vid.

[Red 984]

What happens to all these costumes once an event is over? Do they get discarded or does SEGA put them in a vault? Would love to know if some of these Classic Sonic costumes are still kicking around. At the very least the SA2 one is still alive - it was used at an international event fairly recently.