Every popular medium of human expression can be personified by individuals whose image and essence came to represent the field in which they excelled. Einstein. Elvis. MJ. Picasso. Kasparov. These people are icons of their respective professions. Well, video games have their icons, too. Whenever the general public sees these characters, they think "video games". This list reflects my selections for the Top Ten Icons of Video Game History.

One of the earliest video game icons, Donkey Kong started his life as the epynonymous villain of the arcade game. In the 25+ years since, Kong has played every possible role Nintendo has thrown at him. He's been a protagonist (Donkey Kong Country), a captive (Donkey Kong Jr.), a brawler (Super Smash Brothers), a baseball player (Mario Superstar Baseball), a racer (Super Mario Kart), a drummer (Donkey Konga), and many, many others. I wonder if he remembers how to roll a barrel down a steel girder?

For a game old enough to drink, MTPO still yields a lot of gamer stories. But why not? Pixellated Mike Tyson was as tough a final boss as a game ever saw. His "dynamite punches" were almost impossible to see coming, they were faster than light, and they were BOMBS. During a period of time in which Mike Tyson was invincible, untouchable, and utterly dominant, it just so happened that his MTPO self was twice as badass. Watch VH1's "I Love the 80's" to hear celebrity accounts of taking on Pixellated Mike. When a video game character engenders that sort of awe and respect throughout three decades, I'd say that's pretty iconic.

A highly accurate simplification one encounters with respect to video games is this one: Final Fantasy VII ushered in the big-budget era of game production. SquareSoft certainly got their money's (45 million USD) worth - Final Fantasy VII became the best-selling game of its time. The game did for role-playing games what Super Mario Bros. did for video games in general - it grew the popularity of the genre. The cover of FFVII shows Cloud Strife, the protagonist, standing defiantly in front of a Shinra office building, his trademark Buster Sword strapped to his back. The antihero Cloud, with that sword and spiky blond hair, came to personify FFVII, SquareSoft, and the glory days of the Sony PlayStation.

After the great video games crash of the mid 80's, it was Nintendo's NES which brought games back into prominence. By the end of the 1980's, arcades once again were well-attended, fun, and profitable. And in the early 1990's, one arcade game brought a serious buzz back to the arcade - and that game was Street Fighter II. The balanced gameplay, the lightning-quick action, the varied characters with their extraordinary moves - all of it combined to make the arcade exciting again. And one character - the low-key character in traditional garb, the character who earned the canon ending - came to represent that game more than all the others: Ryu. (Don't let Jean-Claude Van Damme's cinematic turn as Guile convince you otherwise.)

In the early days of video games, the arcade-goer would drop his or her quarter into the cabinet and control a character - the problem was, the "character" really had none. Your choices were a vertical bar (Pong), a non-descript spaceship that only moved from side to side (Space Invaders), a non-descript spaceship that moved in four dimensions (Defender), and so on. But with Pac-Man, video games at last had a recognizable character the general public knew by name and by sight.

"No one player is bigger than the game." That may be true in professional football, but in video game football one coach, one name stands above all the others - John Madden. When Madden first worked with EA's development team, he rejected prototypes of the original game because "if it's not eleven versus eleven, it's not real football." EA took that to heart and the Madden brand has been, throughout its history, famous for injecting as much realism into the game as the hardware will allow. The smallest details are taken into account. So successful was the Madden formula that the NFL granted EA an exclusive license to produce its video game. Many coaches have won Super Bowls. Only one has done that and become the face of video game football.

The tomb raider of feature film, Indiana Jones, was a world-famous movie icon long before the 1996 release of Tomb Raider. But for gamers everywhere, Lara Croft turned Indy from icon to relic in no time flat. Here was a sexy, pistol-packing Brit who could survive ancient deathtraps and take down assassins - all while retaining good humor and class. In a sense, Lara was more James Bond than Indiana Jones. If an A-lister and world-class hottie like Angelina Jolie portrays you in two feature films - you might be a video game icon.

Literature had Beowulf. Film had Conan the Barbarian. Music had Der Ring Des Nibelungen. Indeed, high fantasy had been well-represented in all other forms of expression for hundreds of years. But video games had yet to produce a bonafide classic work in that genre until 1986 when The Legend of Zelda was released. This protagonist, the knight in shining armor, is not one, strictly speaking - Link is a young elf boy clad in green. Despite exclusion from the first game's title, Link has been the face of one of the most enduring and most popular game franchises of all time.

It's hard to recall now, but there was a brief time when Sega ruled the home console market. This occurred while the 8-bit NES was more or less pressed out and the 16-bit SNES had not yet hit the scene, but this is hardly an explanation: the TurboGrafx-16 was also available and directly competing with the NES. Games make systems, characters make games - and Sega took down a giant, however briefly, with a speedy, spunky, overly-caffinated blue hedgehog. Since Sonic's debut, he has launched countless video game titles, cartoons, comic books, and more. He's nearly twenty years old now, but Sonic the Hedgehog is going strong as ever.

He made his debut in Donkey Kong and even took a turn as villain in a sequel called Donkey Kong, Jr. But in 1985, Mario starred in the greatest selling video game of all time, Super Mario Bros. The game was groundbreaking, visually pleasing, and highly addictive. SMB (and its leading man) did more to bring video games to the general public than any that came before. Few games since have had even a similar impact. Today, despite fierce competition from giants like Microsoft and Sony, the overall-clad Italian plumber Mario is the greatest icon video games has ever known.

And there you have it. A few notable omissions I'll touch on: 1) Pokemon. Yes, it's the second-best selling franchise ever, but to me, the general public thinks of Pokemon as trading cards or a TV show before a video game. Besides, who is the icon - Ash or Pikachu? 2) Solid Snake. The Metal Gear franchise has been a huge hit across many platforms, but how recognizable is Solid Snake outside the world of gaming? 3) Tiger Woods. A true icon, but he's a real world golf icon who happens to headline a golf video game. It's a little different than the Madden or Tyson situations. 4) Mega Man. Popular, but not general public popular IMO. Anyway, hope you enjoyed it. :)

List by FoppyNation