Ecco The Dolphin - Greatest SEGA Game Ever

As I've said elsewhere, I love Ecco. It was my absolute favourite SEGA game, and not because it's about a dolphin. It's beautifully rendered, well mapped out, the challenge is in solving the puzzles throughout the levels before you run out of air, rather than in violently bashing or shooting everything in your way, it spans a whole ocean and features a huge range of marine creatures, has a great score (with the exception of that AWFUL victory tune at the end) and -- most importantly -- it tells an imaginative and moving story. The ending was actually a real surprise, and it was enough to give me nightmares as a kid. The Machine is f*cking creepy.

Here it is in all its original 16bit glory (Ah, the good old Mega Drive days...) played by cubex55 over at Youtube. Enjoy.



Of course, as this is just a recording of someone else’s game, it’s not going to be as engaging as if you were playing it yourself. You don’t get to explore each level in your own time, it’s all done for you so you don’t have the satisfaction (or frustration!) of having to work it all out for yourself, you don’t get the nasty surprises when the sharks and crabs come at you out of nowhere, or when the ice cubes and rocks come flying out of the walls at you. You also don’t get to play around doing all the somersaults and leaps at the surface that you can when you’re playing it.

I kinda feel cubex55 has cheated a bit in places, most obviously in the Open Ocean stage, where he’s just zipped along at the bottom of the screen, avoiding all the challenges on that level... but I guess if your goal is just to get through the whole thing as fast as you can without dying then that’s to be expected. I prefer to play at a slower pace, paying attention to the details as I go.

This game was always going to appeal to me – I’ve always had something of an obsession with the ocean, and Ecco combines that with time travel and aliens, two of my other favourite themes. It’s all very Aliens meets Cocoon. I think it’s slightly hilarious that Ecco inspires his own distant ancestors to leave the land and return to the water, to eventually evolve into his own species. I love how the oldest living creature is a giant DNA double-helix. (I also LOVE the backwards-flying pteranodon!)


One of the things I really appreciate about the game is that you only get anywhere by helping others. Throughout the game, Ecco has to reunite families and locate the precious things of others that they have lost. I think it’s a good moral.

The PC edition of the original splices in some great cinematic animations to tell the story as you go. It was followed by the even more beautifully rendered Ecco the Dolphin: The Tides of Time and Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future, which lack some of the charm of the original, in my opinion, but have much better graphics and ditch the traditional left-to-right scrolling format.