Do kids today still know who/what Sonic is? I take it for granted that everyone knows who this guy is, he ended up becoming a known entity through cultural osmosis in the same manner as Ronald McDonald, Bugs Bunny, or his arch-rival Super Mario. They were all characters with iconic designs, spent a lot of time on TV and frequently made appearances in other forms of media and most importantly were popular with kids. If you brought up Sonic in casual conversation and they didn’t know what you were talking about, they may as well have told you they don’t know what rain looks like, it was just such an unfathomable notion.

So uhh, I have no idea if he’s still popular with kids today. He still gets video games, comics, TV shows and movies, maybe even more today than he was getting back then! But this new generation of humans… Let’s just say I’ve heard things about what sort of stuff they enjoy and it doesn’t make me very confident in saying they would have any idea what a “Sonic” was, how can they learn these sorts of things when they spend 4 hours a day on makeup and “cultivating their brand”? Alright, time to get off that tangent before I have my old-person-yelling-at-cloud moment! Let’s assume, by chance, that you don’t know who or what Sonic the Hedgehog is. He’s the main character of a video game by the same name released for the Sega Megadrive (Genesis in the US) back in ‘91 and in case it wasn’t obvious, he is in fact a hedgehog and you might also have worked out from his name that he is in fact a fast hedgehog! That’s the joke, you see? Because the stereotype surrounding hedgehogs is that they’re usually very slow (even though they’re actually not) and this hedgehog is the fastest thing alive!… Also he’s blue and naked except for bright red shoes! This is all you need to know and you can stop reading now.

 

The “Blue Blur”

 

But yeah, Sonic was a pretty big deal when I was a kid, I had toys and comics, even watched the TV show, though I didn’t actually own the game it was based on. The only time I really got to play was either at my cousins house on their Megadrive, which at the time was the most fascinating thing in the world to me! Or, I also knew a couple of friends who had Sega Master System’s which were like, the precursor to the Megadrive and there were some Sonic games on there too, although even back then I knew the one my cousins had was way more fun. You just couldn’t compete with 16-bits and blast processing! For context, all I had at the time was a Gameboy because my parents didn’t want me hogging the TV with a game console, they also probably believed it damages eyes or some such nonsense. And even when we did eventually get another TV, we went the Nintendo route anyway, which meant the official video game mascot of the household was actually Super Mario. It’s probably not thought about much today because Sega don’t make consoles any more and Sonic appears on Nintendo consoles all the time, they’ve even been in the same games together! But that would have been absolute heresy back then. People still talk today about the “console wars” like which console ends up winning their generation in terms of adoption rate but the real war was always Mario VS Sonic. It was always a talking point on the playground, there would always be comparisons and arguments for or against either one, it was crazy! Although ultimately I was shuffled into the Mario camp, I still had a soft spot for Sonic because he was the first one I was exposed to and he just had that cool-dude-with-’tude vibe that 90’s kids ate up.

 

So what exactly happened in this video game, “Sonic the Hedgehog” that made him into this icon of coolness? What does he do?… Well, he runs through a series of platforming levels, sometimes going pretty darn fast! Along the way he will bash a variety of robot enemies by spinning into them, because he can curl up just like a real hedgehog, but travelling at wrecking-ball speeds, then freeing a trapped animal from inside! All the enemies in the game are robots that are controlled by animals, or powered by animals… I don’t think it ever explains how it works. But it’s all the work of evil scientist and primary antagonist of the series, Dr. Robotnik, who you must defeat in a variety of wacky contraptions at the end of each themed zone. None of this really answers the question, though. This sounds more like a cheesy “nature good, human bad” pro-environmental propaganda piece, surely there’s more to it than that? The more I think about it, as well as its sequels and spin-off media, that’s pretty much the gist of it for all of them. Was it all a lie? Some sort of super effective marketing stunt that had us think he was cool when in reality he was the video game equivalent of FernGully? There must be more to it than that, since he’s still relevant in media today and continues to get possibly the most fan art any one single fandom ever had. Like, there is so much of it, more and more every day… Much of it probably not suitable for kids.

 

Sonic in his first ever encounter with Robotnik, time the jumps to avoid the wrecking ball.

 

Well let’s start with the actual game itself and the sequels it pumped out (there were also a lot of spin-off games of varying genres but I never got to play most of those). A really good video game is something that can stand the test of time and have people coming back to play again and again, so maybe the gameplay was just so good, that’s what made him so appealing? I mean, yeah I recently went back and played through the originals included in the Sonic Origins compilation, I also went and tried the same games in an emulator just to make sure the newest releases hadn’t changed too much and yep, they all still hold up very well! The modern releases are all in widescreen too, which helps tremendously for games like this, letting you see further ahead when running fast! Pretty much any 2D platformer benefits from a wider screen! As mentioned, the first Sonic has you run and jump through half a dozen zones and take down Robotnik. He’s the bad guy bent on world domination, you’re the good guy here to stop him, pretty straightforward stuff. There’s a lot of intricacies to the gameplay in terms of physics, momentum and level design but there’s a lot to cover and I need to cram multiple games into this piece so I won’t be going too deep into that, just believe me when I say it was a fun time, and I suspect even without the heavy marketing push behind it, this would have gone down as a legendary classic either way! Solid start! But enough to be a foundation for a franchise?

 

Tails was the first new character added to the series with Sonic 2.

 

Sonic 2 was a huge deal, highly anticipated and by all accounts met the already high expectations people had! It was more of the same, but had a larger number of zones and a super spindash move where you could rev up and launch yourself forward at high speed, great for getting up steep inclines if you didn’t already have momentum! But the most important addition was a new sidekick character called Tails! He’s a cute little fox boy who simps after Sonic and uses his two tails like propellers to reach speeds just as fast, he can even fly! This was the first of many new characters to be added to the series. As usual, Sonic must traverse each zone destroying robots and Robotnik’s crazy machines. He’s out to get seven magical gems called Chaos Emeralds to power his ultimate weapon, the Death Egg (clearly an homage in name AND design to Star Wars) and Sonic has to get them first, at least he does if he wants the good ending. These were actually in the first game too but there were only six of them and they weren’t particularly important. In Sonic 2, finishing a stage with 50 rings or more lets you enter a bonus stage, a really cool looking, pseudo-3D halfpipe you run down collecting rings and avoiding bombs. Do well enough and you earn a Chaos Emerald! Collecting all seven not only gets you the best ending, but also allows you to transform into Super Sonic, a yellow version of Sonic with spikier hair, faster speed, higher jumps and immunity to damage! Such a cool reward to work toward, but it’s not easy! Modern versions let you retry bonus stages so it’s a lot easier now but back then if you managed to unlock Super Sonic you were a God among mortals, some didn’t even believe it was real!

 

Sonic’s robot doppleganger kidnapping Amy Rose!

 

The next game was made exclusively for the Megadrive’s CD attachment, Sonic CD! This one… Was not such a highly anticipated smash hit, in fact I never even knew it existed, because I never knew anyone who had the CD attachment. Again, more of the same, except this time Tails is absent and we get introduced to another new friend, Amy Rose! She is basically Sonic’s love interest, or rather he is her love interest, he doesn’t seem to have any romantic feelings toward her and instead just finds her irritating as she fawns over him. Unfortunately, unlike Tails, she’s not a playable character (except in Sonic Origins as DLC content) and instead she is the damsel in distress that Sonic needs to save. This time, Robotnik has invaded Little Planet looking for the Time Stones, which he wants to use to conquer the past so he’s absolute ruler in the present and beyond! This is also the first time we meet Metal Sonic, a mechanical doppleganger and featured heavily in the marketing material but barely shows up in the game, booo! Sonic bonus stages always like to try and mimic a 3D environment, because it was the 90’s and anything 3D was considered awesome! In this game, they used the extra horsepower from the CD attachment to do some clever sprite scaling tricks to make a 3D environment for Sonic to run and jump around in, destroying all the UFO’s nets you a Time Stone!

 

Sonic encounters Knuckles for the first time.

 

Lastly is the confusing one, Sonic 3 & Knuckles. It’s an odd name, but it was an odd concept! At some point during development, someone had the brilliant idea of taking what was going to be Sonic 3 and then splitting it into two games. Sonic 3 would contain the first half of the game, then 8 months later they’d push the second half of the game out as Sonic & Knuckles. The gimmick here was that you could physically latch the Sonic 3 game cartridge on top of the Sonic & Knuckles one to combine the two into “Sonic 3 & Knuckles” which was basically the full game that tied both characters stories together. Oh yeah I should probably mention, the new character introduced this time is Knuckles the Echidna. He guards a powerful gem called the Master Emerald and Robotnik tricked him into thinking Sonic and Tails were coming to steal it, while he secretly plans to use it for his own evil ends. Definitely foreshadowing for the future of gaming, taking a game and then selling bits of it back to you later! Judging it in its combined state, though, it’s an absolutely enormous game! People thought the whole attaching the games together thing was a novel idea too and it was something everyone was raving about! They also made it so that you could attach Sonic 2 and play through that as Knuckles, which is super neat actually?! Each of the two games would also have the seven Chaos Emeralds available from bonus stages, this time another pseudo-3D graphical showcase where you run on a giant 3D sphere, running into blue spheres while avoiding red ones. Both games had the same bonus stage and both once again allowed for a Super Sonic transformation. Sonic & Knuckles had a special ending boss only accessible as Super Sonic, as well!

After that, Sonic sort of dropped off the radar for a while. The Megadrive became obsolete once the next generation of consoles arrived and while Sega did put their Saturn system out before the competition, it was expensive and not great at 3D. See, in the early to mid 90’s computer generated 3D graphics were all the rage! Movies had started using them about a decade prior for some special effects but it had gotten to a point now where it was starting to look so good it was “almost like real life”! Of course, it looks ugly and dated by todays standards but the people (at least in the West) demanded 3D! The issue is that with such limited hardware, Sonic just fundamentally would not have worked in 3D, and I definitely recommend doing some research on “Sonic X-Treme” which would have been the flagship Sonic game on the Saturn if it hadn’t been cancelled. You can see from the demos and prototypes they were making some really massive compromises and it looked and ran like shit. The whole affair is quite a fascinating story though so, go look that up if you haven’t before! With no main Sonic game, that left the Saturn with nothing but ports of the Megadrive games and “Sonic R”, a racing game I’ve never played but apparently is very mediocre and everyone makes fun of the music for some reason.

 

Sonic R was probably the closest thing to a real Sonic game on the Sega Saturn, unfortunately…

 

Miraculously, Sonic managed to become a big deal once more when Sega launched their next (and final!) console, the Dreamcast! This thing was hyped up massively, I remember someone had brought a gaming magazine into class and we were all looking at the preview pages for it, just in awe at this supposedly “128-bit console” and how crazy advanced the graphics looked when compared to our lowly Playstations and Nintendo 64’s. And it wasn’t just the graphics which seemed futuristic, the Dreamcast could even connect to this “Internet” thing that was catching on fast so you could play multiplayer games with people who weren’t even in the same room, how crazy is that?? Then there was the VMU! Basically, consoles back then had no internal storage for saving game progress, so game saves would be stored on the game cartridges, to a dedicated RAM chip kept alive by a cell battery. You can’t write data to CD’s, though, so the new generation of consoles had to take a different approach. Playstation had memory cards, basically swappable little plastic cards that could store maybe a dozen game saves on it, although it depended on the game because some games consumed a lot of space! You could always buy more, though. Nintendo kept using cartridges with the N64 but also adopted the memory card idea, the reason being it makes it easier to swap with friends or maintain your own saves, or something, I dunno, I didn’t own one of these. The Saturn also had memory cards but also had a small amount of internal storage which was nice of them. So, the VMU! This was like a memory card for the Dreamcast, but it has its own screen and software on it and latched onto the controller, so like the controller itself had a little screen of its own that was also the memory card!! This was nuts! There were definitely Tamagotchi vibes coming from it! I know I’ve gone off on a tangent about the Dreamcast here, but it’s important because, while the Saturn didn’t get a proper Sonic game at all, the Dreamcast actually launched with one right out of the gate, so to really get across how hype this all was you have to appreciate that this console was VERY exciting!

 

Robotnik and newcomer antagonist, Chaos.

 

With that out of the way, “Sonic Adventure” came out alongside this new console and commercials for this game were everywhere! TV, billboards, every video game store, even toy stores and superstores, they all had posters showing Sonic’s new “modern” design, he was taller, leaner and I dunno how to describe it but it was so much cooler than the aging old frumpy design, like he’d aged from a kid to a teen, just like his audience! And so it was that the world finally got a high-speed, fully 3D Sonic game, on cutting edge hardware! It was also incredibly ambitious in its scope, having the game split between six characters each with their own stories and stages that often intersect as part of the overall plot. This time, Robotnik shatters the Master Emerald that Knuckles was guarding with his new flying fortress, releasing a powerful creature that had been trapped inside for thousands of years, known only as Chaos. This guy is like some sort of water creature with a fluid body that has a taste for Chaos Emeralds. Every gem that Robotnik feeds him causes him to mutate into new and progressively more dangerous forms. The story is basically the race to stop Chaos from getting all seven and like I said the story is split between six playable characters. I won’t go too deep into the stories because they are so much more complex than previous games and I genuinely can’t remember the details as it’s been ages since I played this, but basically you have Sonic or Tails who are racing Robotnik for the Chaos Emeralds, their paths do diverge a little but they’re essentially the same. Next is Knuckles, of course, who is gathering up the shattered remains of the Master Emerald, his stages are all wide open worlds with a hot-or-cold system for detecting nearby shards which you then dig out of the walls or floor. Next we have a returning character, Amy Rose! She’s had a massive redesign since Sonic CD, with a completely new outfit and hairstyle. Her story revolves around finding a baby bird that escaped from Robotnik’s flying fortress and has a robot in pursuit of it. She plays a lot slower than Sonic, but can wield a huge hammer. Next is Gamma, one of Robotnik’s strongest robots who mutinies against his creator after befriending Amy after she is captured. He’s also pretty slow but has a canon with automatic lock-on! Lastly is Big the Cat… All he really does is fish, and it’s boring and annoying… His frog companion/pet accidentally swallowed a Chaos Emerald and now everyone’s after it. It was a massive game, far more edgy and epic than any Super Mario game and I think that was the intent. They filled it with fully vocalised music, some impressive pre-rendered cutscenes and a much deeper story that games like this were used to having. They also packed in a bunch of collectibles and minigames, obviously since the Chaos Emeralds were integral to the story this time they couldn’t be the secret items you found any more. Instead, they had 130 emblems to collect, but they didn’t really do anything. There were also Chao Gardens, with Chao being these cute little creatures you could raise basically like virtual pets. You could change their appearance and stats (used in a race mode) by bringing them the animals you’d freed from destroying robots. I personally was more into the Chao Garden in the sequel but we’ll talk about that shortly! It should also be worth noting that this game received critical acclaim. But not gonna lie, it’s not good. It might have been impressive at the time, but it’s aged terribly. The stilted character animations, janky gameplay that’s prone to glitches, just generally speaking it’s aged really poorly. Honestly if there were a competition for games that were deserving of remakes, this one would be a top contender!

So it might surprise you to learn that despite Sonic Adventure being this highly anticipated, as a launch title on a system that also had gaming nerds excited, I never actually got to play it at the time. Because we never bought a Dreamcast and I didn’t know anyone else who did either. While the initial sales of the console weren’t too bad, they fell off a cliff once the Playstation 2 came along. Since the Playstation was by far the most popular console at the time, people waited the extra couple of years for that instead. Not only did it push graphical fidelity even further than the Dreamcast, its secret weapon was the fact that it could also play DVD’s. And since it cost roughly the same as a standalone DVD player, it was a no-brainer, the Dreamcast had no chance.

 

Sonic Adventure 2 really upped its game in terms of polish and presentation.

 

And that might be why sales for “Sonic Adventure 2” were so abysmal. By the time this came out, the Dreamcast had already been discontinued and Sega had pulled out of the console market for good. A very depressing note to start on for this release, indeed! But yeah it’s more Sonic Adventure, the ambition was scaled back a lot this time, but had a lot more polish and feels a lot more competently put together, which means out of the two it definitely aged the most gracefully. This game marks the first time that Robotnik fully goes by the name of Eggman. Originally, he was always Eggman from the very start but the American arm of Sega decided to call him Robotnik insatead. In Sonic Adventure, although still going by Robotnik, he’s often referred to as Eggman as a sort of derogatory nickname, and by Sonic Adventure 2, he’s fully adopted that name for himself and going forward this is the name used regardless of language. So, what’s he up to this time? He found a diary belonging to his Grandfather that speaks of an ultimate weapon locked away at a top secret government facility, so he breaks in to try and claim it for himself. What he ends up finding is Shadow, a black and red hedgehog that looks a lot like Sonic! The two get to work on stealing Chaos Emeralds, framing Sonic because he’s the only speedy hedgehog anyone knows! Turns out Eggman’s Grandpa built a space station with a deadly canon that can only be powered by the emeralds and they plan to force the world to surrender by threatening to use it. Again I won’t go into all the little intricate plot points because like the game before it, the story is relatively deep compared to the previous outings, but once more we have six playable characters with intersecting stories! In the previous game, each character had its own story, but in this one there are only two stories, split between “Hero” and “Dark”. Playing the Hero story will have you playing stages as Sonic, Tails and Knuckles, while going with the Dark story will have you playing as Eggman, Shadow and another newcomer, Rouge the Bat, a sexy secret agent playing both sides of the field. Rather than all six characters having unique gameplay mechanics like before, this time there’s really only three. Sonic and Shadow do the fast, speedy platforming levels, Knuckles and Rouge do the hot-and-cold treasure hunting, and Tails and Eggman are both in mechs and control similarly to Gamma from the last game. Pretty much everything is improved this time around, it’s a lot harder to glitch through the floors, the animations are now far more natural and not just the character models standing there twitching. But again, I didn’t get around to playing this game until a couple of years later when I bought a Gamecube, the game got a re-release on there. I don’t think it gets talked about enough how much of a shock to the system it was see a Sonic game on a Nintendo console, that would be like Nintendo releasing a Mario game on PS5 today, absolutely unthinkable!

The games after this point aren’t on the nostalgia radar for me yet, but Sonic Heroes I remember being excited for, wondering what the next 3D Sonic game would be like and how much they would improve on what they’d already done with the Adventure series. This would be “Sonic Heroes” and it was fucking awful. I don’t think I played another Sonic game until Sonic Rush on the Nintendo DS, which I remember being fun but don’t actually remember a lot about beside the introduction of Blaze the Cat, which was the second playable character with her own story. I think it was a good game? I don’t know, maybe I just liked it because it was a Sonic game on the DS? Later on I’d get Sonic Generations which, in my opinion is the only 3D Sonic game they got right, and lastly there was Sonic Mania which was a return to his Megadrive roots and actually made by a studio comprised mostly of avid Sonic fans!

 

The comics and cartoons kinda went off and did their own thing. With mixed results.

 

I didn’t even touch on the cartoons! I probably should but I think I’ve gone on a bit too long as it is, plus I should probably actually rewatch the cartoons before I say anything about them because it’s been such a long time I barely remember anything about them. Oh, and the comics as well, the Sonic comics from Archie are a whole new rabbit hole I am unsure I want to go down, I think they got up to like 200 issues!! And they have their own cast of characters, but also re-enact plots from the games and there’s alternate universes and it just looks like a hot mess. Some of the artwork I’ve seen for it is also so so bad. Like, actual incompetent bad and not just a product of its time. It contrasts with other comic artists from the same series that do a fantastic job as well, so I don’t know what they were thinking. Apparently the comics are done by a different company now and they threw out all the characters introduced in the 90’s that didn’t come from Japan. That sounds pretty sucky actually, I kinda like the direction Western Sega was pushing for more than what Japan was doing…

Nowadays, Sega unfortunately slap Denuvo DRM onto everything they release, which I am actively boycotting so I won’t be buying any more Sonic games, but there’s plenty I could go back and investigate if I were so inclined, and frankly I might be! Sonic’s universe and lore is so vast and there’s so many obscure little side projects, plus the character designs really lend themselves to creativity, with the simple body plans basically acting as a canvas for anyone with creative intent to manipulate into their own OC, regardless of how talented they are. As I mentioned earlier, Sonic just seems to get a disproportionately large amount of fan art in comparison to other fandoms and I would guess that the relatively simple designs which leave a lot of room for artistic expression, coupled with having an established world and lore you can just drop your creation into, could possibly be the key contributor to why he seems to have such staying power, possibly even the only one! I may get shot for saying this, but the majority of his games have aged really badly, it’s only the 2D platformers (and even then, not all of them) and Sonic Generations that have really held up, a track record of quality this spotty would never have supported a franchise this big. Unfortunately, I am still none the wiser about my initial question about whether todays kids even know who he is, but there are definitely a lot of people out there who care deeply, whether they’re new fans or the old ones like me who never really grew out of it… Also, why are there no mouse characters?

Something something PINGAS!!