As Cool As Cool
Cool is one of those words that will be around forever. While we might not call things “rad” or “funky” or “groovy” or “hip” anymore, we still call them cool. And in the future, when we’ve stopped saying that things are “dope” or “fire” or “sick”, we’ll still be calling them cool. Because the word cool is, for lack of a better word, cool!
You might think that’s a brave prediction! After all, who can really know what words will still be cool ten years from now? But the word “cool” really does seem to have a lot more staying power than all of its slang rivals.
Using “cool” to mean stylish, relaxed, fashionable etc. dates back to just after World War II, so it’s already over seventy years old!
As Cool As… Jazz?
You probably don’t associate the word cool with jazz, but that’s what it originally described—a new kind of relaxed jazz that was very different from the harder, more aggressive style of the music that had come before. It was the legendary Miles Davis album Birth of the Cool that pushed the style to the attention of the public and the rest is history. It’s a long history… and a cool one!
Cool Video Games
In the early days there were definitely no cool video games! Computers in general were something that was seen as a nerdy, even unhealthy thing to be interested in. Video games were seen as an antisocial, lonely hobby.
These days, video games are huge and are definitely part of the mainstream culture, with as good a claim to being cool as anything you can see on a screen. You probably already think that it’s possible for games to be cool, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this!
That doesn’t mean every game is a cool video game though! Not even every good game is cool. You might well think that Football Manager and Train Simulator are great games, but you probably don’t think that they’re especially cool. For a game to be cool, it needs to have a sense of style and it needs to take risks. It needs to have a voice and say something about our culture.
Fake Plastic Cool
There are times when games companies try to force the public to think that their games are cool. If you’re old enough, you might remember Cool Spot on the Genesis and the SNES. The main character, Cool Spot himself, was a big red spot with sunglasses and sneakers. That’s a pretty thin way to try to make a character cool! It really didn’t help that Cool Spot was a mascot for 7-Up. What was even worse was that he could only collect power-ups by collecting letters that spelled out his parent company’s name!
Although Cool Spot might not have been as cool as his name would make you think, he was the star of a pretty solid platform game. It was praised by critics and fans for its great gameplay, clean graphics and smooth animation… but not for its cool!
Weird but Cool
Toejam & Earl was a game from a similar time that got a lot of the ingredients for cool just right. The difference between Earl & Toejam and Cool Spot was that Toejam & Earl was weird, funny and made fun of Earth culture in the nineties. OK, its two main characters were “alien rappers” and wore sunglasses, high-tops and backwards baseball caps to prove it, but it was just as a parody of the cultural appropriation that was so common at the time.
It helped that the game was good! Somewhere between a roguelike and an action game, you had to help the aliens search for parts to rebuild their ship and escape. It was a genre-defying satire of everything and it was a cult classic.
Cool Games on GamePix
If you’re looking for cool games to play, then this part of the GamePix website will provide them in abundance. Our cool online browser games come in a range of styles and genres but they’re all united by their distinct coolness.
- Games like Cool Cars Jigsaw Puzzle and Cool Digital Cars Slide rely on the effortless cool of high-end sportscars for the style of their puzzle-based gameplay
- Cool IO games like Cool Cubes IO wrap the hugely popular IO game mechanics in a cool, cuboid wrapper
- For those that want a challenge, Cool Math is from the school of the cool math brain training games
- For soccer fans, there are cool football games like Cool Score and Cool Goal
The coolest thing of all? Every game in this section is playable on any device with a web browser, so you can get a little slice of cool right on your phone, tablet or any other device that can access the internet. Like all of our online cool browser games, they are completely free, forever. It doesn’t get cooler than that!
FAQs
What is a cool IO game?
Coolness may well be in the (sunglass-wearing) eyes of the beholder, but Cool Cubes Io, right here on GamePix, is definitely a cool IO game! Like all of our cool online games, it’s playable on any device with a web browser, without any downloads or updates. And you can enjoy it for the cool, cool price of absolutely nothing.
What online games are cool?
It depends who you ask but the games that most people think are cool usually have a sense of style to them—they have a certain look to their art style, or a certain way of making a mood. Sometimes they’re just the most popular game in a genre, or the one with the most innovative gameplay. Of course, the coolest thing is just to be yourself in your choices, so why not try some of the cool browser games here on GamePix until you find your own cool? They’re all free and they all work straight out of any browser-enabled device, so you can try as many as you like.
What are the most popular cool?
- Body Drop 3D
- Turbo Dismounting
- Paper.io 2
- Madalin Stunt Cars 2
- Paper io
- Bottle Flip 3D
