>>15596906
This seems highly revisionist. I remember the PS1 era, and Crash was obviously the mascot. The only one I'd say was close was not even Spyro, but Lara Croft. But her games were not strongly associated with PS1 specifically, despite that being how the vast majority of people were playing them.
>>15596984
You forgot how big Halo was for the Xbox?
>>15597202
Was this even "unofficial?" NiGHTS is owned by Sega and was all over the marketing. I know I certainly saw NiGHTS as the mascot that the time. Even as a kid with no internet, I knew it was the creators of Sonic, because they were marketing it as basically the followup to Sonic, and Sonic was obviously Sega's mascot to that point, meaning NiGHTS was the new mascot.
>>15598060
Characters who were intended to be mascots but failed or were replaced as such are interesting. I've heard that Robbit from Jumping Flash! was intended to be the PS1's mascot, which makes sense since it's a very early PS1 title, which was a platformer (the genre that practically all mascots were) and had a cutesy animal protagonist (though a robot animal, which kind of worked with the PS1's high-tech style).
Jak & Daxter, probably specifically Daxter, was clearly intended to be the PS2 mascot, but mascots were falling out of favor. But there's a reason Sony bought Naughty Dog, then had them make another game with a funny orange animal with attitude, even though you don't actually play as him in the game.
Sony seemed to give a half hearted attempt to make Sackboy the mascot for PS3. It would have been a good idea, as even aside from LittleBigPlanet being a first party platformer with fairly good success, the fact that the entire point is that he's customizable, and thus could play different characters in commercials to represent other games and ideas makes him a great mascot.
But I guess the PS3's real mascot was Ricky Bobby. He was the original pack-in game, after all. I half jest, but I'm honestly surprised they never tried to make a Talladega Nights game. That movie was huge with the Nascar crowd, as well as the regular movie audience, and it would have been very obvious to just make a racing game out of it.