The Bonus Stages in Cool Spot Were 7up-Drenched and Intense

Cool Spot Bonus Stage

Cool Spot for the Sega Genesis is a surprisingly great game that I think has stood the test of time — it still feels great to play after all these years. There is also a version on the Super NES, which was mostly identical with a few small tweaks (the SNES version is more colorful and doesn’t quite have the audio chops to make the music work as well, for example). However, all of my time spent with Cool Spot has been with the Genesis version, so that’s the version I tend to focus on.

One of your objectives in the game is to collect little red dots, of which there are 100 per level. You must collect 60 to be able to complete a stage — at which point you can unlock the cage and free your Spot friend to move onto the next stage, or you can keep playing to collect more spots. If you collect 85, however, you unlock a bonus stage, which you’ll be whisked off to once the stage is complete.

The bonus stages are incredible. They stick you inside a giant bottle of 7up, which is sweating from the humidity, and you must find the hidden letter in the stage. (The letters spell out UNCOLA, a word that has long been a part of 7up’s marketing.) Additionally, there are also 100 additional spots to collect throughout the level. Your time is short, but it can be extended by finding timer power-ups hidden in the stage.

Cool Spot Bonus Stage

Plus, the bonus stages might have the best music in the entire game (really, the entire soundtrack is fantastic, composed by the legendary Tommy Tallarico himself).

Of course, all of this sort of makes you wonder how big Spot is supposed to be — or how big that 7up bottle would have to be. Spot seems to be perhaps about an inch or an inch and a half in diameter in the rest of the game, but here, he’s small enough that the inside of a 7up bottle seems enormous. He’s either shrunken down considerably, or the 7up bottle is the size of a freaking barrel.

Anyway, I’ve posted a complete run of the first bonus stage. The run is perhaps a bit sloppy, but I did manage to collect the letter U and all 100 spots.

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