Coca-Cola Kid

This might sound weird, but I’m absolutely the target market for this game. The name “Coca-Cola Kid” makes its intent as a marketing avenue for Big Coke pretty obvious, but ever since I was a kid, I’ve been a regular soda drinker. I like it all, but I’ve always preferred Coke over Pepsi. You just can’t beat Vanilla Coke especially, now that’s the good stuff! To be fair to Pepsi, there is Pepsiman , so it’s not like the brand has nothing going for it. I’m fully aware it’s not at all healthy for you regardless of what brand is slapped onto it, but hey, we all have our vices, right? Anyway, it’s not just the oddly charming bluntness of the game’s mission statement that would have totally sold it to me when I was a kid; Coca-Cola Kid is a 2D platformer exclusive to the Game Gear with nice animation and great sprites that came late in the system’s life and plays a whole lot like Sonic. That’s, like, exactly the kind of thing I used my Game Gear for back in the day! I’ve mentioned my history with the Game Gear before, so if you’ve been following this blog, you may have guessed that this would end up on here eventually. Though it was never released in the US, I recall it being a relatively early fan translation for the Game Gear (circa 2007), so I’ve always wanted to check it out. I have a kind of nostalgia just for seeing its name in rom lists despite never having played the game. I’d always have it ready to go on whatever my emulation machine of choice was alongside all the other Game Gear translations, but I never did pull the trigger. Well, that day has finally come! I probably don’t need to tell you this considering it’s a megacorporation with tremendous power, but Coca-Cola was pretty ubiquitous in Japan . Still is, even, and if you dig around for various articles like this one , you’ll get results that indicate it’s among the most successful beverage brands there and that Japan is their biggest market outside of the US. I don’t live in Japan so I can’t speak from experience, but if they’re still coming up with exclusive drinks for the country and reporting consistent financial growth, I think those are pretty clear indications of success. Because of that, I bet Sega was absolutely salivating when closing the deal with them to make a game. With the help of developer Aspect, of course, a developer that had backed the Game Gear for a few years at this point. Coca-Cola Kid had some marketing hype backing it, for sure; write-ups about the game’s development in Beep! Mega Drive magazine , promotional t-shirts , even a special edition red-colored Game Gear bundled with the game, yeah, Coca-Cola Kid was trying to be a thing, alright. That issue of Beep! Mega Drive I mentioned even goes as far as to claim that a certain hedgehog would be shaking in their boots after seeing this game (according to this translation of the write-up from Sega Retro), which is a pretty bold statement to make! Well, the Coca-Cola Kid himself was already an established thing even without this game. Coca-Cola has had several mascots over the years, but Cokey, a skateboard-using, yellow cap-wearing kid was supposedly one for Japan during the early 90s. I say “supposedly” because I’m having a weirdly hard time finding any commercials with him in it! The Beep! magazine issue from before does briefly mention the existence of commercials, so I’m sure it’s true, but I was surprised how obscure they seem to be even after all the digging around I did. I did find this website talking about special branded sodas, one of which featured a can with Cokey on it from 1991 (drawn by Akira Toriyama!), so that at least lends some additional credence to the kid having been a thing before his game. Regardless, I quite like Cokey’s design. He’s extremely 90s, what with the backwards hat and his preference for skateboarding, and he kinda looks like the protagonist from Pokemon Gold and Silver to me (that came after, obviously), but since “90s cool kid energy” was what they were g