I've been thinking about this game [Awesome Possum] a lot lately because the federal government has just been taken over by an administration that rejects the idea that humanity should take any economically difficult steps to combat global warming. Unlike in Awesome Possum, environmental destruction isn't an explicit goal of humanity, just a side effect of continued global industrialization. But still, a very bad game from 1993 now feels like a crucial text in the canon of dystopian warnings.
Awesome Possum wasn't alone in its radical environmentalism. The Sega Genesis has a slew of games that focus on cleaning up pollution, protecting the environment, and being nice to animals.
I remember when it was cool to celebrate earth day, and get excited about the "reduce, reuse, recycle!" mantra. I even remember Captain Planet.It was, perhaps, a better time to be alive.Read the whole story on Motherboard."For us it was clearly a conscious decision," Tom Kalinske, the CEO of Sega of America from 1990-1996, told me. "I always allowed the development teams to do what they loved to do, to do what they were passionate about. The guys involved in these games were very much environmentalists."