Surprised to see Crash winning the poll.
He's a big icon for sure, but bigger than Doom Guy? Bigger than Master Chief? I don't think so.
The problem, that some users have mentioned, is that when you talk about the status of a franchise, is it because of the concept of the game, or the characters?
People can get testy about it, but the truth is you have to assume people have vague recollections of stuff, and when you say "DOOM", you have to assume the median response is "Oh, that game where you shoot demons!" without knowing there were originally three episodes in the first game and the first was just shareware, not to mention the lore about mega corporations doing shady experiments and tampering with the universe. Heck, as much as people like to forget about DOOM 3, the reality is you aren't really a badass in that game. It played more like a survival horror game than a shooter because the emphasis was placed more on the atmosphere than combat. You will probably notice a trend on this list where I mention characters who may be popular now, but as another user commented, were at one point going the way of Frogger.
Minecraft is another example. Okay, I know people may get upset if you call Steve "Minecraft Guy", but again, you must rationalize.
So, here's my list:
1. Master Chief: Microsoft doesn't have many known IPs, and even fewer successful IPs (I mean, look at stuff like Blinx, Sneakers, Kung Fu Chaos, Kakuko Chojin, and Voodoo Vince from the early Xbox days), but if there's a dude that embodies the history of Microsoft Studios, it's Master Chief. I keep suggesting that if we get Banjo & Kazooie, Master Chief is a likely contender because Microsoft isn't just going to give them one character and not insist they add a few more as DLC incentive.
2. Rayman: While other characters have had a larger impact, aside from Master Chief, nobody has really had the longevity as Rayman. I mean, it's difficult to name a BAD Rayman game that didn't feature Rabbids, while with some of the others you could bat off every game they had in the mid 2000s and it seemed like they were destined to fade into obscurity, and the character was reinvented several times to successful results.
3. Crash Bandicoot: Before Sony became lush with IPs (the exact opposite of Microsoft), Crash Bandicoot became the face of the gaming console before sports games and RPGs found their home on the system after not wanting to put up with the Nintendo 64, and at one point, he was just as big as Mario & Sonic. The irony here is that if you asked about Crash Bandicoot ten years ago, people would act like he was a tired relic of yesteryear, as most of his games around that timeframe either were awful (Crash Boom Bang, Crash of the Titans) or forgettable (Twinsanity, Tag Team Racing). It wasn't until the N. Sane Trilogy that people paid attention and realized how cool he was in the first place.
4. Lara Croft: The weird thing about Lara Croft is that while her games are popular, she's got two distinctive periods and between those, she was in the same situation as Crash Bandicoot; only she got revitalized first. The first period was during the mid to late 1990s when she was arguably the most sexualized video game character ever and, unlike a Duke Nukem who was designed to be a joke character, didn't leave much to the stories each game told. After a wandering period (as third party characters tend to), the series was redeveloped as a survival sandbox game that did a 180 on Lara, where she's now a tortured soul. And although SquareEnix (who own what was Eidos) has Cloud in the game, if we see another SE entity, it's either Super Mario RPG or Dragon Quest.
5. Scorpion: In the 1990s, Street Fighter AND Mortal Kombat went hand-in-hand as arcade juggernauts, with each catering to a specific crowd (one wanted frantic combat, and the other wanted all that gore), and unlike the previous two, the series didn't have a completely awful 2000s (Shaolin Monks, aka
Anthologies: Liu Kang, & Armageddon are both pretty good games), so the fact that when Midway became Netherrealm Studios, they were still able to make good games in the series and even improve on some of the franchise's early shortcomings. The problem is... whether fans want to argue about it, the reason you will never see Street Fighter cross over with Mortal Kombat like they with SNK, Marvel Comics, Tekken, and even an anime studio is simple; whenever you took away the Fatalities and all that gruesome stuff, people complained. That's why people hated the cartoon, that's why they hated the SNES version of the original Kombat, and that's one of the reasons why any overall attempt to make a Teen-rated installment is poo-poo'd. You could counter that argument with Injustice, but Injustice plays as close to Mortal Kombat as possible while keeping a Teen rating.
