It’s been a long time since Spyro the Dragon was in the spotlight, but back in the original PlayStation days, the purple firebreathing dragon stood alongside Crash Bandicoot as one half of Sony’s ‘90s mascot duo. Though both series are owned by Activision now, there are still remnants out in the world of the days when these two were the faces of PlayStation. One such relic, a statue of Spyro that was used to promote 2000’s Spyro: Year of the Dragon at E3 that year, has been recovered by a fan who found it sitting in a random gas station in St. Helens, Oregon.
As you can see in the 26-year-old footage above, the statue of a prowling Spyro was originally set up at Sony’s 2000 E3 booth, overlooking attendees as they played Year of the Dragon on the showfloor. After the event, Spyro was kept alongside a Crash statue in a Forest Grove warehouse Sony occupied, and then given to the building’s owner as a gift when Sony moved out. At some point, The Arc Arcade in Astoria, Oregon, acquired the statue and displayed it in the venue until it shut down operations in 2017. Since then, the Spyro statue has been missing in action. Until Momoka, a lifelong fan of Insomniac’s original platformers, came across a video showing the statue in what appeared to be an abandoned gas station.
“I actually found out about this statue because my boyfriend showed me a reel and was like, ‘[Momoka], check this out!’ they said in a message to Kotaku. “I was right in the middle of playing Dark Souls III at the time, so I was honestly so confused. Nowadays, you can’t even tell what’s real and what’s AI anymore, you know? It was bugging me, so I literally paused my game to dive into the comments, hoping to dig up some clues. Luckily, someone mentioned that the statue was somewhere in St. Helens. Since I live here in Oregon, St. Helens is only about a 45-minute drive for me so the distance wasn’t an issue at all.”
Momoka says that the person who posted the original video “refused” to share any information about where the statue had been located, but they had enough to go on to start searching for it themselves with Google Street View. Initially, they were under the impression that Spyro had been abandoned in an old supermarket, but none of the abandoned buildings in the area appeared to be a supermarket. However, after some searching, they stumbled upon a gas station they described as “completely boarded up,” but the door matched the one in the original video. With a little more sleuthing that had them staying up until 5:30 that morning, Momoka found out the building had been sold to a new owner in 2021, and managed to track down two possible phone numbers in the yellow pages.
“As soon as I woke up, I started getting ready for work and tried the first number,” they said. “I just got a recording saying, ‘This number is no longer in service,”’and my heart totally sank. But as I jumped in the car and started driving to work, I decided to take a chance on the second number. I was absolutely terrified because you never know if someone is going to think you’re completely crazy. I mean, who calls you out of the blue at 9 a.m. asking if you own a specific property and a purple dragon?”
When Momoka called the second number, they got an answer: it was the owner, who said he actually “forgot” about the property after he bought it in 2021. He told Momoka that Spyro was in the gas station when he bought the building, and that he’d left the statue alone because he wasn’t sure what it was.
Momoka says they told the owner the history of the statue and the character, and he agreed to give it to them because they were “the only person who actually [knew] his story,” and he was impressed that they’d found him after so many years. Though they couldn’t meet to make the exchange until Monday, May 18, Momoka went to the address to see it in person, and was surprised to find the statue was much bigger than they anticipated, measuring in at around 12-feet long.
“Panic started to set in,” they said. “I was like, ‘What am I going to do now?! I had no idea he was this big.’ But honestly, I didn’t care about the size, my mind immediately shifted to figuring out how to get him out of there. The longer I stared through that window, the bigger Spyro looked. I actually have a phobia of seeing giant figures in the dark, so seeing him inside an abandoned building was incredibly creepy, and I was having a really hard time.”
Though the sight of the PlayStation mascot being trapped was upsetting, Momoka tells Kotaku that it made them more determined to get him out. They secured a flatbed truck and temporary storage space for the statue before finally meeting with the owner on Monday, and when they arrived, the owner already had the statue moved outside and ready to go.
“The second we pulled up, I jumped out of the car and ran straight over to hug [Spyro],” Momoka recalls. “I didn’t care at all that he was super dusty. I felt this instant connection with him, and it felt amazing to finally be able to actually touch him instead of just staring at him through that tiny door window. I started walking all the way around him to check him out from every angle, since I had no idea what condition his other side was in after being stuck in the same exact position for years.”
All things considered, Momoka says Spyro was in “incredibly good shape,” though they note that his purple paint has faded, one of the eyes is cracked, and his wings need replacing. Though the owner was willing to give the statue to the group for free, Momoka says they insisted on giving him some cash. As for the future, Momoka wants to do some restoration and eventually display the statue at a retro gaming convention in Portland, and is asking fellow Spyro heads for help.
“I don’t really have a timeline yet,” they said. “Right now, we’re just trying to find the right shade of purple to give him a fresh coat. There are some little white patches and some areas that faded over the years. I also want to replace his wings because one of them is almost my size, so they’re just too heavy. Plus, I don’t really trust the inside of the statue since you never know what kind of condition it’s in after all this time.”
It’s been over 20 years since Insomniac and Sony put out a Spyro game, and even now that the series is owned by Activision, it’s still been fairly dormant in recent years. The 2018 Spyro Reignited Trilogy collection remade Insomniac’s original games for modern platforms, but before that, there was a major gap between Spyro games (except for the Skylanders toys-to-life games that had the dragon in them, but he was more of a supporting character across the franchise’s lifetime). As of this writing, Spyro’s last video game appearance was in the 2023 Crash Team Rumble MOBA as a guest playable fighter.
