THE ASTONISHING ROLES OF THE INCREDIBLE CHARACTERS OF WILD 9!!!!!

So "Wild 9" was a video game put out by Shiny entertainment in 1998, and it was advertised on the basis of having NINE, count'em, NINE totally extreme main characters! Wow, look at those guys! The game was hyped up even more by its official website, which offered practically a novella's worth of lore spread across extensive character profiles for not only all nine heroes but a slew of creatively odd and gritty villains!

Often mistakenly credited to Earthworm Jim's original creator - who had long left Shiny Entertainment by that time - the game took place in an artificial network of "stolen" planets, ripped from their original solar systems and integrated into a collective under the tyrannical rule of a god-like entity, Karn, with a childishly ignorant and rage-fueled mind. Fighting back against this monstrosity and his vast empire are, of course, the rebel freedom fighters known as the Wild 9, a band of misfits and weirdos from every corner of their chaotic, patched-together galaxy.

The game itself wasn't too bad, ultimately. You began as Wex, a teenage boy who was, for some unknown reason, the only person capable of operating a superweapon called "The Rig." The core mechanic of the game, this weapon functioned as a portable tractor beam that allowed you to grab, pull, swing and throw things around with bolts of crackling energy. It was a tad disappointing when it became evident that you would continue controlling only Wex, but we were assured that we could find and recruit the remaining members of the Wild 9 over the course of gameplay, whose unique powers would be CRITICAL in helping our progress.

Still sounds like it has a lot of potential, doesn't it? So just who are all these characters, and just what are all those unique powers we make use of in the game? How about the villains, too?

CLICK MOST ART for their original, high-resolution official uploads!

So, regrettably, Wex is our main character for the duration of Wild 9. This means you get to use the rig weapon, and its mechanics are pretty fun for a while, but it also means you hear Wex saying "WEXCELLENT!" every time you grab a power-up. He's by far the least interesting thing anyone came up with for this setting and reeks of Marketing Executives who felt Wex should be a white, 17 year old male because "that's who buys our games." I've heard there was a point at which he was going to be a girl, and another point at which he was going to be a robot or an alien. Even just the human girl would have been a little less typical for games of the time. Fortunately, many of our other characters will be a lot more fun to talk about.

As for B'angus, he's alright as a "funny critter" mascot character, sort of a sugar glider with bushbaby eyeballs in a weirdly squashed-looking head. His old website bio went into a lot more detail, but those bios were unfortunately never collected in working order by the internet archive. What I do remember is that B'angus isn't just hiding from that arch-nemesis, but from a princess of his species that wants to marry him. B'angus's only in-game role, however...

...Is appearing as an icon in sporadic dialog boxes, providing a little exposition and gameplay tips. He didn't really have any reason to exist, at the end of the day...so what about the rest of his friends?

I'd imagine Volstagg here would have been a fan favorite had Wild 9 really taken off as a franchise. He's a big mutant ape with antlers, but he supposedly has this chivalrous princely personality and a tragic "cursed beast" angle. Little does he realize just how many furries are out there for him.

IN-GAME ROLE: in the very first stage, you'll find Volstagg hanging from some chains. Once you free him, he'll help you push an obstacle out of the way on the very next screen, demonstrating how handy his strength should come in!

And then he leaves.

No, really. You let him down, he pushes one thing a few feet to your right, and then he teleports away. This is the very last you will ever see of him. You can't proceed without freeing him, but you can't miss him anyway. He's right there, exactly where your path has been blocked, and with one button press he will fix that for you, just the once.

So, okay, this game might have suffered from a little crunch time or something. They won't all be like this, right? Haha. Right? lol. Oh my god.

Why was the 90's so in love with the concept of "INSANE" characters? It was played up by so, so many cartoons and comics. Suddenly, it was like being mentally ill was the hippest thing you could possibly be as long as you were a cartoon whose mental illness made you entertainingly rambunctious and not a real person whose symptoms might make someone sad.

Still, there are some merits to the idea of Pilfer. Having a violently chaotic little creature as the starship captain isn't something I've ever seen done before, like if you had to rely on the Tazmanian Devil to fly a plane and somehow it always just worked out in the end. His design is okay, a simplified hairless, noseless, earless humanoid of unknown species. Unfortunately...

Pilfer is not in the game.

I always liked the idea of characters who explode as a superpower, and then they're okay again. They're usually presented as being fairly cool and intimidating, though, whereas Nitro is this tiny, frail, sickly, absolutely pitiful looking little man giving us puppy-dog eyes from his oversized biohazard suit.

IN-GAME ROLE: for once, a character sticks with you for an extended portion of a stage, but that's the most exciting thing about our encounter with poor Nitro. He doesn't even walk on his own, he just wobbles in place until you use the Rig to move him, and since he's "allergic" to the rig, moving him starts the countdown to his next explosion, and seconds later he'll regenerate. You'll use this to blow open obstacles when you're not just awkwardly lugging him around.

You can tell these bios were written as part of a "series bible," to drum up intrigue to audiences and investors alike for the possibility of more Wild 9 content. This is written precisely like the character summary of a cartoon show pitch. Mac is kind of interesting; he's a stereotypically handsome human face attached to a collection of rusty metal spheres and other gizmos taking a roughly humanoid shape. His lost website bio delved deeper into the fact that, despite his goofball personality, he was the end result of especially grotesque and torturous experimentation by Karn's scientists. Even being another 90's Radical Teenage Boy, I think Mac would have been a much better main character. The Rig could have just been one of his arms, and he could have had all manner of other abilities. But alas...

IN-GAME ROLE: okay, sit down for this one. In one stage, you'll find Mac in a prison cell. Above his cell is a lever, and blocking you from going any farther is a door. You've encountered these levers and doors throughout the stage, but if you try to pull this one...it breaks off! Don't worry though, when you open Mac's cell, which is the only thing you can do, he will jump up and transform into a replacement lever! Then you can open the door! Then Mac leaves! It's exactly the same thing as pulling a regular lever that doesn't break, but this one takes twice as long! Thanks, Mac!

One of only two female characters in Wild 9 is the same skinny, long haired, youngish woman the 90's considered the absolute epitome of sexiness, just with a giant diamond in her stomach and shiny, glassy skin. It'd be a largely forgettable design if not for the "living hair," flowing into the shape of a snarling mouth, which raises interesting questions about Crystal's biology, if she has any other than "solar powered." All we know is that she was yet another science experiment.

IN-GAME ROLE: one stage takes place on a darkened, smoggy planet, so you'll have to switch various sun lamps on and off to keep Crystal moving forward. Slowly, very slowly moving forward, and insulting you in a "valley girl" voice every time she freezes again. You spend the longest amount of time with this character, mostly because her mechanics are to make an entire stage take three times the usual time.

Dude. You really went straight for this little guy's throat one sentence in. What in the world did he do wrong?! They really emphasized Pokkit as being miserably sad and lonely. In fact, if you count B'Angus, there are actually ten members of the Wild 9, and some parts of the game's manual DO count B'Angus, so there might have been an intentional joke that their very team name overlooks Pokkit's presence. Cold. His design is ironically one of the more memorable, a tiny blue man whose moppy hair covers all but his nose and his mouthful of big, blocky teeth, wearing his signature pouch-covered jacket and his little bike flag. At least Crystal's hair apparently likes him??? :'(

The idea of Pokkit being a failed experiment is interesting, working like a totally unreliable Bag of Holding. You could have gotten a lot of interesting game mechanics out of that, I'm sure, but I think you know the drill by now.

IN-GAME ROLE: when you find Pokkit in one stage, he'll jump on your back and successfully pull out a bazooka, so, you'll have access to a gun for a while. It's just like if you found a regular gun lying around, and then you had it for a while.

This is my favorite of the Wild 9 themselves, for obvious reasons. A liquid being inhabiting a hi-tech suit resembling a huge, round water tank with a pair of stumpy legs! Unfortunately, Henry is the one character whose official artwork was never uploaded in high resolution, and despite having a character bio in the instruction manual, the website forgot to ever put his up at all, so we know precious little else about "least human in form, yet the most human in spirit" of our main characters.

IN-GAME ROLE: a boat for a few moments.

So our other female character is also just a human from Earth, like Wex, which of course defaults her to being his main love interest. She's also supposed to have superhuman strength, but only because she was the daughter of a dead superhero and can channel his spirit. Is it just me, or does it feel like this character is in the wrong game? Her story and gimmicks don't tie in to the setting of Wild 9 in any way, and don't even suit a science fiction motif! She couldn't simply have superhuman strength from another biotech experiment? Why do we even need to know it was really the superhuman strength of a character that only existed prior to this story? Boomer kind of feels like a leftover from another project, or from a period when Wild 9 was going to be even more "random" and ecclectic with its themes. Not terrible, though, in fact, shortly before this game came out, I knew a couple people who thought she was the most interesting character for whatever reason, and couldn't wait to see what she would do.

IN-GAME ROLE: Ha ha ha. Hahahahaha. Oh god. This one ties in to another character, and we're gonna get to that one last. We're all done with the heroes, so now it's time for the JUICY stuff. That's right!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!NOW IT'S THE VILLAINS!!!!!!!!!!!!

While the internet archive failed to preserve the original, in-depth website profiles for any of the Wild 9 themselves, it oddly enough held on to the character page for every antagonist, so you'll see just how detailed some of these profiles originally got, beginning with...

...Okay whoaaa, whoa, whoa, hold up, what? "Mid way through our series?" Henry switches sides? This villain replaces him? Good lord did they get ahead of themselves! This and the rest of the villain profiles really demonstrate just how many ideas the creative team exchanged, how excited they were about these characters and their obvious hope of a long-running new franchise, already talking as if they had a 50 episode television show in the pipeline.

So Filbert is a mutant frog guy powered by electricity, and when his power runs out he turns into just a regular frog. Cute concept! He seems to have been a favorite of the dev team, since they planned to give him a little bit of a redemption arc here, and he's even featured on the game's cover. Naturally, he gets his own boss battle, so you obviously exploit his weakness by waiting for his battery to drain, yeah?

IN-GAME ROLE: walks around on stilts and drops grenades on you.

This is another one that feels like it came from a "sillier" iteration of Wild 9, a cartoonish, grouchy sheep that's apparently also a killer twisted cycle path. Shouldn't he be Pokkit's rival, though? He's the perfected version of the same experimental tech! You could get some pretty funny story antics out of a villain obsessing over a character every other character keeps forgetting exists.

There was so much concept artwork of the Black Sheep on the old website, it was definitely another of their favorite concepts. But...

The Black Sheep is not in the game.

I really love how nasty and wretched this guy is, sort of like a scuzzy, bipedal donkey but significantly more terrifying than that description should entail. For whatever reason, I remember this one the most readily as a "main" villain of Wild 9. What's most interesting about his design however is that there's a little tiny "rider" on his back, some sort of humanoid whose stubby arms and legs stick out from a backpack-like saddle Ramzig wears at all times. Other, lost bio information did mention that this figure regularly digs its little spurred boots into Ramzig, but never explained who or what this being really was.

IN-GAME ROLE: this game has multiple "racing" levels, pitting Wex against a single enemy racer. In one of these levels, the character status icon lets you know that the enemy racer is supposed to be Ramzig actually. Wow. Epic.

This is the one I'm always forgetting about. He's just a short, angry, cybernetic military man. His only story purpose seems to be just one more scary jerk to chase after the heroes, this time because they stole his ship. I feel like poor Kragg was just one villain too many, and that we didn't really need one to tie directly into the good guy's car.

IN-GAME ROLE: another racing level has Wex riding on a dinosaur-like monster while Kragg races against you on foot.

Kragg's giant, eyeless, exoskeletal puppy is much more fun than Kragg himself, and a design I really liked back in the day. It looks more like a biomechanical black lizard, and I thought it looked cool that its thin sharp teeth were almost completely enclosed by translucent blue gums. It's a neat little effect.

Tank is not in the game.

TOP quality concept, here. A fused-together duo that create their own creatures on the fly, but can't settle on what any of those creatures should do or what they should look like is an endless recipe for any grotesque hilarity you can imagine, and I love that they're also a bird attached by the foot to the head of a bipedal crocodilian, a cute reference to the alleged (if sadly disproven) symbiotic relationship between real crocodilians and small tooth-cleaning birds. Had we gotten to see more of this setting and its storytelling, we already know from this profile that these two aren't even always on the villain side!

...However.

DARWIN AND THE BIRD ARE NOT IN THE GAME.

...I can't explain why if you weren't there, but a ghoulish looking, murderous hulk with a cracked yellow smiley face mask is just about the most 1990's character design that could ever possibly exist, and boy were they fond of it. This same artwork of the enigmatic "Happy" was all over promotional magazine spots, web articles, strategy guides and more, something they must have felt was uniquely striking enough to really sell the game.

HAPPY IS NOT IN THE GAME.

These little guys, surprisingly enough, never had an official bio in either the manual or on the website, even though they were seemingly the game's main mascots and even central to the whole storyline, as these "Little Evil Green Men" were apparently Karn's final ultimate weapon and "perfected" minions. Tiny, roughly humanoid globs of green slime with singular, huge yellow eyeballs and the power to explode, kind of like Nitro, but only once, which is just how B'Angus describes in the manual's opening story. The crew loved these so much, they produced a MASSIVE amount of artwork featuring the LEGM in all sorts of comical situations and outfits, using many of these images as the game's loading screens.

IN-GAME ROLE: LEGM appear as small, bouncing sprite-based enemies that damage Wex and burst when they run into him. A little underwhelming, though there are some robotic walker-type enemies that appear to be "piloted" by LEGM, and the final stage of the game takes place on a planet with a bright green, glowing sea of slime that LEGM are constantly leaping from. While almost harmless individually, a nearly planetwide mass of rambunctious little creatures is a pretty formidable thing for a villain to control.

At this point, they were fully presenting Wild 9 as a television pitch, and this is obviously my favorite concept in the setting. Mantis is a big, dark, menacing insectoid who's actually, secretly, just a pitiful glob of flesh with one eyeball, a mouth and spindly little arms, definitely channeling a bit of Krang from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. A scary looking beast actually controlled by a degenerated little critter is probably one of my top favorite creature design tropes, but you don't see it too often. Mantis is the other character I most often remember, and I feel like this single piece of artwork was pretty inspiring to me back when I first saw it. There may very well be a little dash of Mantis still bleeding into the spirit of my Mortasheen setting, or even some characters in my webcomic, Awful Hospital.

IN-GAME ROLE: seriously for real just another racing level. God damn, man. Couldn't even be another actual battle, like Filbert? Filbert wound up being the ONLY one we properly fight with?! Just one villain left, now...

Did you actually read ALL of that? I completely understand if you didn't. It's a lot, and some entire paragraphs could have been summarized with the words "mean guy." The idea of a being created from the discarded mental flaws of another intelligent force is cool enough, though. It certainly explains why this bad guy is just plain "bad" with no deeper motivation, and the idea of this being behaving more like a spoiled, temperamental kid is an entertaining enough twist that actually makes him a lot more frightening. The metallic insignia where he ought to have a mouth even kind of reads like a pacifier!

It's also a pretty creepy and creative concept that instead of actually employing a fleet of evil scientists, Karn keeps a bunch of scientists in stasis and reads their minds as needed. I'm surprised I haven't seen that concept more frequently, and I really like that it ties together almost every other character as a by-product of his quest for the perfect physical body. I, too, would be just as indecisive if I could potentially be anything.

And now, the moment you're really waiting for:

IN-GAME ROLE: the final battle of the game has Wex running from Karn, who is for whatever reason only roughly as tall as a giraffe in this scenario and attempting to step on Wex with big, robotic shoes. Clutched in Karn's left fist, in her first and last role in any form of media, is Boomer, who cries "help me, Wex!" every few seconds until you have hit Karn enough to end the game.

So, there you have it: a cast of impressively creative, lovingly detailed characters created for a game that incorporated most of them as little more than one-time tools or weapons. Sometimes a tool or weapon you didn't actually need at all, except for a single problem they left on the same exact screen. I realize that budgetary and time constraints will happen to the best of us, but even being able to play as all nine characters would have required little more than changing the player model and their method of attack. The gimmick here could have been nine different characters played across nine different stages pretty easily, and even if all they could have done was run around and shoot things, it still would have felt a little more engaging than using an entire character as one lever.

Nonetheless, it's easy to see just how much love and optimism these writers and artists had for their creations. You can practically hear the late-night studio meetings where the flow of ideas must have bounced around a table most likely occupied by the occassional pizza box, rounds of giggling as someone, maybe I daresay a little high at the time - even on as little as too much coffee or not enough sleep - suggests that Crystal's hair should be in love with Pokkit, or the kind of mess Darwin and Bird might make.

Nothing panned out the way any of them would have hoped, and very few people now remember Wild 9 at all, but even after I finished its underwhelming final boss...I actually still liked it, and I like it to this day. Yes, it has a central hero as exciting as wet cardboard, its only two heroines are the "girl power" kind most would rather forget, half of its villains appear as only pixel avatars and the graphics by today's standards also resemble wet cardboard, but the setting, style, soundtrack and intentions were fantastic. I, too, had some hope that maybe I'd get to see more of these wacky heroes and villains some day, in some other form of media, and though that obviously never happened, many of the things we've just gone over have somehow remained pretty fresh in my mind for my entire life since 1998, and I kind of wonder if anyone involved with the project still thinks about any of them as well.

As much excess, unused content as we've just seen, there certainly must have been mountains more still, evidenced at the very least by some of the other conceptual art still floating around the internet. I've gathered a selection of that here, which also gives some additional insights into characters we've already met, but several of these images come with no known context at all. A little peek into something once understood by a small circle of coworkers, maybe friends for just a few months out of their lives, who I like to think had so much fun sharing ideas with each other, it didn't really matter how many of those ideas ever left the room. Not the most thrilling video game of the 90's, but certainly one of my favorite creative brainstorms that I ever had the chance to peek in on.