Buck the Bunny was Gamestop’s answer to their own mascot problem. Buck vanished for what felt like no good reason, and Gamestop didn’t fill the void in with another mascot after the removal of Buck. Especially with recent times for Gamestop, it’d seem like a great buisness decision to revive what was once an amazing character. Buck was an edgy bunny character designed to appeal to an older demographic. Typically swearing and being angry at what was happening during his commercial. He reminds me a lot of a combination of Happy Bunny and Foamy the Squirrel with the high pitch voice and bleeping sound effects. Buck was shown typically in commercials on 2d side-scrolling environments with 8-bit sound effects to best mimic gaming troupes and be as relatable to the gamer stereotype. Each advertisement commercial was actually a solid bit of entertaining advertising content and in my opinion, some of Gamestop’s best efforts to get people to buy products.
Buck the Bunny was sold on all sorts of merchandise, like plushies and t-shirts. Towards the end of Buck’s likeness with the brand, Gamestop released an IOS mobile game called Buck and the Coin of Destiny on the Apple app store. So what happened to Buck? A post on Reddit states that an anonymous source reported that: “The Buck the Bunny origin story video was played at a managers conference. This showing was said to have strong disapproval by Paul Raines who was CEO of Gamestop from 2010 to 2017. Raines met with Mike Dzura who was Senior VP of store operations 2007 to 2013. Raines said he hated Buck, thought he was too raunchy for his company, and that he never wanted to see him again and Buck was removed.” You can find the clip in question on this YouTube upload. Paul Raines stepped down from being CEO in 2018. His correlation to Gamestop’s decline is unknown to me if he had any part in contributing to its current challenges. I just know with Gamestop’s attempts to include trinkets and products from places like Think Geek, THEY SHOULD BE SELLING THEIR BUCK THE BUNNY.
Reddit User Sloanthesloth shared on a post: “Buck was slowly getting phased out here. I’m not sure if anyone ever said why. Employees have training called “Level Up”. And they redid it a year or two ago. When they created the new levelup, they had a “lesson” on there that stated that buck the Bunny was dead, and we now had spiny Norman. He’s some kind of monkey thing I think. That said, Spiny Norman is not actually a thing, meaning he’s never been used in marketing. Funnily enough, buck can still be found on a few things in our system, so he’s not yet dead.” EB Games (GameStop in Australia) uses Buck all the time in their Rewards marketing. You earn carrots for dollars spent, with bonuses for pre-owned & trading. The United States where I am from at the time of this blog post, is not utilizing Buck the Bunny in their stores. You can’t even search for merchandise on their website. The post linked in this paragraph talks a lot about the stock speculations on why Gamestop is hinting that Buck might be coming back. They speculate that its to sell $GME.
What is even more annoying was when Gamestop brought back buck the Bunny during the NFT era to create a few terrible tokens to sell to people, a complete slap in the face to long-time fans supporting Gamestop. An upcoming video game Kiraverse let’s you play as Buck the Bunny Read more here. KIRAVERSE is an online multiplayer game created in Unreal Engine 5. Kiraverse looks like a Fortnite game but with some NFT implementation. you can play, compete, and earn to unlock or rent characters, skins, weapons, and much more. while bringing NFTs to life and putting digital ownership directly in players hands. The Buck character was made available exclusively on GameStop’s NFT platform and sold out quickly, as collectors and fans alike snapped up the chance to own a piece of Kiraverse and Gamestop history. The NFT grants only owners the ability to play as the exclusive Buck character, creating a scarcity around Buck in-game. NFTs are stupid and personally do not like the concept of Kiraverse. If this new game had similarly structured online item shops like Fortnite, while it wouldn’t be better. You would atleast own the item. NFTs are stupid (if you didn’t read the first time 😂)
Buck’s short-lived PR run goes on to be in my opinion, the best part of Gamestop’s legacy. One that other regions in the world recognize, while the United state’s branch refuses to use.
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