It's The 30th Anniversary Of Kid Chameleon, The Most '90s Game Of All Time
To understand what was seen as the height of cool in the 1990s, look no further than the cover art for Kid Chameleon. The titular star of this Sega platformer is wearing a leather jacket, stonewashed jeans, a crisp white tee, and high-top Reebok Pumps. He's riding a skateboard, his hair is slicked back, he has sunglasses on, and he's flanked by a samurai, a knight, and other characters the teens of the day would consider to be, in the parlance of their times, totally bitchin', dude. It's the '90s distilled into a single image.
Kid Chameleon was developed by Sega Technical Institute, an American development division of Sega based in California. The studio was founded by Mark Cerny, who is better known today for his work with Sony designing PlayStation hardware and consulting on first-party games. Cerny worked as a coder on Kid Chameleon alongside director Graeme Bayless (now a producer at Mortal Kombat dev NetherRealm) and Yasushi Yamaguchi, an artist famous for designing beloved Sonic character Miles 'Tails' Prower.
Related: Beavis And Butt-Head's '90s Adventure Game Still Rules
The story is extremely '90s too. An arcade game called Wild Side arrives in town, and any kid who plays it mysteriously disappears. Casey, the real name of Kid Chameleon, journeys into the game to investigate and encounters the villainous Heady Metal. This rogue AI has been kidnapping anyone who wasn't able to beat the game, forcing Casey to beat the game himself, defeat Heady Metal, and free his trapped friends. This was an era when being the only kid in the arcade who could beat a tough game was something to aspire to.
When Kid Chameleon launched in 1992, side-scrolling platformers were all the rage on 16-bit consoles. Super Mario World had
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