A few days ago, I was hanging out with some old friends of mine, and took part in their weekly podcast (Carolyn & Joe Show). Aside from talking at great length about Boy Meets World and its subsequent spin off Girl Meets World, eventually we briefly started talking about Ecco the Dolphin. And aside from me, none of my present company was actually remotely aware of what Ecco the Dolphin was actually about.
It occurred to me that the game was horrendously marketed when it came out for the Sega Genesis, and it really was no surprise that it seemed to be that not so many people had any idea of what the game was actually about. I remember the commercial have absolutely zero success at conveying what the plot of the game actually was, and simply made it look like it was a game about a dolphin, swimming around and doing dolphin things. Flipping out of the water, confrontations with sharks, and even encounters with killer whales! Awesome!
But I guess when the plot of the game becomes apparent, it was maybe probably for the best that Sega didn’t bother to give away any plot points in the commercials, and just tried to sell it as some sort of educational nature game or something. Because when people find out the game is really basically about aliens, alien abductions and time travel, it kind of leaves some people kind of confused. But seriously, Ecco the Dolphin is about aliens, alien abductions and time travel.
And it was about the hardest game on the Genesis. I couldn’t even get to the part of the game where you traveled back in time, and I’m relegated to looking at YouTube speed runs to see how it actually is beaten; who knew walls were randomly capable of being passed through, and that you could dip into molten lava holes which were conveniently sea water once you cross the initial threshold.
Oh, I beat the game alright, with the aide of finding passwords in my GamePro magazines from back in the day. The bigass cheesy alien, where I had to sonar its eyes out, and ram its jaw off to kill it, but I sure as shit wasn’t capable of making some of the impossible jumps, or traversing through the second-to-last stage that almost felt along the lines of Battletoads.
But seriously yeah, if you just read the previous two paragraphs, it’s hard to believe that I’m actually talking about Ecco the Dolphin. The dolphin adventure game that’s about aliens, alien abductions and time travel.
