Ecco the Dolphin · Protagonist · Debut: 1992 · Genesis / Multiple · Created by Ed Annunziata
A bottlenose dolphin who travels through time to fight an alien race harvesting Earth's oceans — Ed Annunziata's strange, solitary Mega Drive hero.
Ecco debuted in Ecco the Dolphin, released on the Mega Drive in December 1992. A waterspout tears through his bay and destroys the sea life there, and Ecco learns that the cause is the Vortex, an alien race that harvests Earth's waters every 500 years. His search takes him to the Asterite and, through an Atlantean time machine, into the distant past, before a final confrontation with the Vortex Queen. The game plays to what a dolphin can do. Ecco charges enemies with his snout, uses sonar to map his surroundings and to interact with crystal glyphs, and must regularly return to the surface to breathe. Creator Ed Annunziata, who researched dolphins for the game and was inspired by Hank Searls' novel Sounding, chose the name because "ecco" loosely means "I see" in Italian, a nod to echolocation. The game sold over 570,000 copies on the Mega Drive and was followed by Ecco: The Tides of Time (1994).
At a time when console mascots were defined by speed and attitude, Ecco was quiet and alone, and his games mixed exploration with a science-fiction story about time travel and alien invasion.