In the 90s Mario and Sonic were the two biggest mascots in the gaming industry. Mario
represented Nintendo and Sonic represented Sega.
Mario came out in the 80s on the Nintendo Entrainment System (NES) and in the same period
Sega had a mascot named Alex Kidd which came out on the Sega Master System. Both were 8 bit consoles, took cartridges and only needed two buttons to play a game. The unique thing that Sega had at that time was that they had games built into the Sega Master System console itself, which I thought was an excellent idea from Sega as I had not seen a console with a built in game.
A fun fact about me is the first game that I owned was Alex Kidd in Miracle World and the first console I owned was a Sega Master System 2, which had Alex Kidd built into the console itself.