Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Sonic the Hedgehog - Bad Attitude
Why couldn't he be more like that nice boy Mario?


When you think about it, welcoming a new gaming platform into your life is a lot like striking up a new relationship. First there's an introductory phase in which you learn about the subject's character and become enthralled by its most alluring qualities. Then there's a months-long period in which you spend a lot of time with your new companion and gain a deeper understanding of its nature and discover the full range of its strengths, weaknesses, and personality quirks. And in the years that follow, you share fun times with it, you make great memories with it, and you continue to strengthen your bond with it.

In that time, you watch on as your companion matures and expands its capabilities. You enthusiastically applaud its growth. You lovingly celebrate its accomplishments. You shower it with praise at every opportunity. And then you fall over in a bloody heap when it unexpectedly plunges a knife into your back.

Well, that's how it was with the Sega Genesis and I, at least. Ours was a sadly tragic relationship.

Image credited to walmart.com.

In the early days, our relationship was great. I was very fond of the Genesis, and I loved being around it. And I was so enamored with its games that I'd go over to my friend Dominick's house multiple times a week just to get a chance to play them. I was always eager to get together with my best pal and spend the afternoon playing round after round of Altered Beast and Golden Axe.

At the time, I was in awe of what the Genesis could do. I couldn't believe that there was a home console that could produce games that looked remarkably similar to the ones I'd see in arcades. And while I didn't feel the need to own a Genesis (buying a Genesis was pointless, I felt, because I already had convenient access to one via Dominick), I was envious of the fact that my friend owned a machine that could capably play host to arcade-level games. None of my gaming systems could do anything close to that, so I couldn't help but feel as though Dominick had something over me--something that he could rightfully rub in my face.

But you know what? He never did anything of the sort. Even though it would have been natural for him to brag about having console superiority over a lowly 8-bit-machine-owning cretin like me, he did no such thing. He never said a single word about it. He didn't see himself as being above those of us who weren't lucky enough to own an arcade-level console.

And I came to associate that attitude with the Genesis. I didn't perceive it as an antagonistic force (despite its aggressively and boastfully advertising its "16-BIT" power on its cartridge slot's cover) or a machine that desired to minimize the 8-bit games that I was still enjoying on the Commodore 64 and the NES, no. To me, it was simply the "the new Sega"--a technologically advanced follow-up to the humble little Master System (the original "Sega," as we called it). It was just something different from what I owned.

In those days, I had no concept of "console wars." I didn't know that the Genesis was designed to compete against a new wave of next-generation machines. Rather, I saw it as a standalone console (the "the beat-'em-up machine," as I called it) whose purpose was to provide us beefy arcade-style action games that we could enjoy alongside our NES, Commodore 64 and Atari 2600 favorites. It was a friend.

That's how it was for the first two years.

But in the later-summer months of 1991, the console scene started to change, and suddenly Sega took on a new attitude. It became antagonistic and spiteful, and its marketing campaigns made it clear that it no longer desired to play nice.

And that's when the relationship began to sour.


So one day, in a scene that played out like many of those before it, I traveled over to that white and red house on 85th Street and visited my friend Dominick, who, I found, was excitedly immersed in a brand new Genesis game that he'd purchased very recently. And as usual, he couldn't wait to show it to me!

The game in question was called "Sonic the Hedgehog," and according to Dominick, it was "the next big thing."

I'd never heard of it.

The reason for that was simple: At that point in my life, I still lived in my own personal bubble and was thus largely oblivious to what was going on in the wider gaming world, so I knew nothing of the Genesis' current state. My assumption was that it had fulfilled its role of providing Sega fans access to home versions of the company's arcade games and now existed purely a legacy console.

That's why I was so surprised to learn that it was not only still kicking but that it had also evolved technologically and could now produce games like Sonic the Hedgehog, which looked like it was on a whole other level. The visuals on its title screen, alone, put all other Genesis games' to shame. They had such amazing shine and luminance to them (which was surprising because it was usually the case that Genesis graphics were dark in color and tone). They were vivid in the most eye-catching way.

"This looks next-level," I thought.


I was entranced by everything I observed in the game's opening minute--by the title screen's striking visuals (including Sonic's audacious finger-waving animation) and resoundingly vigorous musical theme (whose instrumentation seemed to be so much more advanced than previous Genesis games'); by the first stage's incredibly lush, vibrant environments and superbly composed, highly invigorating stage theme; and by all of the bouncy, springy sound effects and the powerful energy they worked to generate.

Sonic the Hedgehog was one of the most visually, aurally and aesthetically unique games I'd ever seen, and I was utterly enchanted by it.

"Where the hell did this game come from?" I wondered as I curiously observed it.

As Dominick played through the game's first stage (whose name I didn't catch because I was too busy thinking about the title screen), I watched on intently and keenly examined the visuals. And I was deeply impressed by what I was seeing. I was captivated by the stage's multi-layer background and the breathtaking sense of depth it created and by the lustrous, glowing stage environments that produced a hypnotically colorful blur as they whizzed by.

At one point, I tried to think of an analog for what I was seeing--of a game that was similar to Sonic--but I couldn't come up with one. I could think of no other game in which an anthropomorphic animal could curl up into a ball and rocket its way across terrain, speed around loop-the-loops, blast through twisting tunnels, spring several screens into the air, run up walls, and traverse large stages in seconds. Sonic was like no other game I'd ever seen. It defied comparison and classification.

Also, it had such an innovative health system! It didn't provide you a standard meter or a gauge and thus limit how long you could survive, no. Rather, it allowed you to endure indefinitely by collecting and retaining rings and by recollecting the rings that you lost when you collided with an enemy or a hazard. As long as you possessed one ring, you could continue playing!

"What an awesome system!" I thought. "And what an amazingly unique game!"


I don't remember how long Dominick showcased Sonic the Hedgehog for me that afternoon or how far I got when he passed me the controller and let me have a go at it, but I vividly recall how I was feeling when I left his house that day: I was in a state of bedazzlement. My mind was filled with images of the "Green Hill Zone" (as it was called) and all of its stunning graphical elements. I couldn't stop thinking about them. And as I walking home, back to my house on 83rd Street, all I could wonder was "How the hell did I not know about Sonic the Hedgehog?!"

And the game had a powerful resonance. For days in following, I constantly thought about its visuals, its music, and its strikingly unique gameplay style. I was deeply under its spell.

Those strong feelings didn't drive me to seriously consider buying a Genesis (mostly because the SNES was on its way and I knew that buying two new consoles and trying to build two separate game libraries wasn't financially feasible), but they made me lament the fact that I missed out on the buildup to Sonic's release. I would have loved to have been there with friends and shared in the excitement and the anticipation.

"If only I'd learned about the game at an earlier date," I thought.


I didn't have to spend too much time wondering about why I was oblivious to Sonic's existence. The answer was patently obvious: Over the years, my interest had shifted entirely to Nintendo products, and consequently I stopped paying attention to all other platforms. And because I no longer read non-Nintendo Power publications or bothered to ask my friends about what was going on elsewhere in the gaming world, I couldn't have known that Sonic had come along and changed the landscape and helped the Genesis to achieve great success.

I didn't know about any of it. And even after playing Sonic, I didn't suspect that the landscape had changed in any significant way. I assumed, rather, that the Genesis was still merely floating around and that the stellar Sonic the Hedgehog had simply provided it a temporary boost.

As far as I knew, the scene was exactly the same as it was two years earlier.


Well, I learned otherwise a few months later, when Sonic the Hedgehog started to appear in commercials.

Up until that point, Sega had been an observably unaggressive company. It had been the quiet, humble video-game pioneer whose modus operandi was to let its products speak for themselves. But now, suddenly, it was behaving combatively and doing so in a venomous way. It was constantly running commercials that were attacking the SNES and Mario games and trying to paint them as slow and uncool. One particular commercial had an "anti-Genesis female activist" (a guy in drag) patronizingly extolling the virtues of the "nice boy, Mario" while "criticizing" Sonic for being so edgy and so full of attitude (both of which, apparently, were important character traits to kids from my generation).

These obnoxious commercials would air all the time, and the moment I'd catch a hint that one of them was about to play, I'd angrily grab my TV remote and promptly change the channel! I didn't want to see them. I didn't want to subject myself to their inexplicably antagonistic content.

What bothered me most about the commercials was the message that they were sending. It didn't make any sense to me! I mean, I knew enough about my peer group to understand that we were all fans of video games and that we all appreciated each platform for its distinctive qualities and the unique experience that it offered. Those of us who owned different platforms weren't enemies. Rather, we were friends who loved having the ability to offer each other access to our disparate machines and their wonderfully distinct games.

"So what need is there, then," I questioned in an agitated manner, "for Sega to suddenly start pissing on those of us who enjoy playing on a wide range of platforms?!"

And I assumed that the masses would agree with me--that they'd join me in thinking that Sega would pay a hefty price for using such unsavory tactics.

But unfortunately they didn't. They didn't share my opinion at all. The reality was that Sega's was a highly effective form of advertising and that its commercials were working to mobilize a new army of system warriors who were eager to champion the Genesis and spread the company's antagonistic message (and some of them continued to do this for decades). And this newly cultivated fanbase was now intent on tearing down the brands of companies who failed to follow suit and likewise whisper into their ears the proper amount of lies about how "cool" and "mature" they were because they owned this Japanese-made machine instead of any of the others.


In truth, the system wars didn't exist in my neighborhood. During that period, I never saw any signs of it. I never once witnessed a scene in which a bunch of kids argued about which 16-bit console was better or about how much cooler you were if you owned one over the other. And my friends and I never broached the subject. As far as we were concerned, nothing had changed; we still believed that every video-game platform was appealing in some way and thus worthy our our attention.

Still, though, it was hard to completely escape the system wars. The TV wouldn't let me. Every time I'd turn it on, I'd find myself watching another one of those annoying "Genesis Does!" commercials, and I'd be reminded that we were living in an era of ruthless aggression that had come about thanks to the hostile antics of that spiny-headed blue miscreant and the company that had created him. And after a while, I got so sick of the insults that I decided that I was done with Sega in general.

"Screw Sega!" I said with great anger. "I want nothing more to do with the company or its dumb mascot!"

At the time, though, I knew that my threats were hollow. I knew that I lacked the conviction to actually follow up on them. The fact was that I still very much liked Sonic the Hedgehog and had no desire to cease playing it. But still I felt as though I needed to act on my resentment. I felt as though I needed to punish Sega in some way. So what I decided to do was not abandon the company but instead greatly reduce the amount of time that I spent playing its games (both on the Genesis and in arcades). That, I thought, would be the most reasonable way for me to express my disapproval with the company's current direction.

I decided, also, that I wasn't going to make my ill feelings known to Dominick or any of my other close friends (because they might have thought that I was crazy). Instead I continued to play Sonic and do so while acting as though everything was fine (though, I'd make sure to subtly sneer whenever I looked directly toward Sonic!). I made sure that the conflict remained completely internal.


But I never let my ill feelings for Sega affect how I felt about Sonic the Hedgehog. I was still a big fan of it. I still enjoyed playing it. I'd still get excited when it would appear on Nick Arcade as a "Video Challenge" game--partly because I knew that it'd be selected and thus I'd get the answer to my questions "Is there any kid terrible enough to fail at the stupidly simple challenge of collecting 25 rings in 30 seconds?" and "How badly will host Phil Moore butcher Dr. Robotnik's name this week?" (often Phil would call him "Robo-Nick").

There was no chance that I was going to stop playing Sonic or put an arbitrary limit on how long I could spend with it. I liked it too much to deprive myself of it. I was too fond of its amazingly lush visuals, its outstanding music and sound design, and its brilliantly new style of gameplay.

Sonic the Hedgehog was a superior 16-bit game, and for that reason, I needed to have it in my life.


And during that period, the Blue Blur was constantly present in my life. He occupied a space in my mind, and he continued to do so even in the times when I didn't have access to his game (in the times when Dominick and I weren't seeing much of each other). I was resentful of what he represented, yes, but still I couldn't help but have soft spot for him and his game.

And for the first few years of Sonic's existence, that's what he was to me: the symbol of an antagonistic company's contempt for the types of games and platforms that I liked but otherwise the irresistible mascot of one of the most appealing platformers I'd ever played. He was a character whose actions evoked conflicting feelings and emotions.

My view of Sonic never really changed, but a certain event helped me to see him in a more positive light and consequently grow closer to him: In the middle portion of 1994, I got myself a Sega Genesis!

Now, I didn't go out and buy a Genesis, no (because at the time, I was short on funds, and I'd run out of couches to dig through!). Rather, it just kinda fell into my lap.

"How?!" you ask with an intensely curious look on your face.

Well, I've mentioned in the past that my father is a very generous man who goes out of his way to help people out financially, and in the early 90s, he helped my brother's friend Eric to get started in life. Eric remained eternally grateful to our family, and one day, as a small token of appreciation, he stopped by our house and gave my brother and I his Genesis, for which he apparently had no further need (he never explained why he chose to part with it, but we believed that he did so because he had his eye on the upcoming Sony PlayStation and needed to make room for it). And if that wasn't cool enough, he also gave us his copy of Sonic the Hedgehog!


My brother, James, didn't care much because he was currently interested in other things (mainly his girlfriend and his band), but I was ecstatic about the whole situation. I mean, getting a new console without having to pay an entry fee was a dream come true, and I was so happy that it was happening! (Though, this is a situation that I feel guilty about in retrospect because of how it ended: A year and a half later, when James and I were saving up for an N64, we sold the Genesis back to Eric, who had somehow forgotten that it was originally his console. So we took him for $100. My hope is that I've been wrong all this time--that he did realize that it was the same Genesis but just didn't care and was happy to hand us free money.)

That day, I had my first personal session with the Genesis, and it was quite a revealing one. I learned a lot about the console during the experience.

The biggest surprise was what I discovered as I was inspecting the Genesis up close. "Wait a minute," I said to myself when I noticed that its controller ports had a familiar-looking trapezoidal shape to them. "Are those Atari 2600 controller ports?! Are you telling me that you can play Genesis games with an Atari 2600 controller?! That's crazy! How did I not notice this before!?"

I couldn't believe it. Ten years after I'd found Atari 2600 controller ports on the Commodore 64's keyboard, I was now finding them in another unlikely place: on the Genesis' front panel! "Why does a 1990s Sega console have Atari 2600 controller ports?!" I wondered while in a state of shock. "Does Sega have a connection to Atari?!"

The only thing I could think was that the ubiquity of this particular controller port was a sign. It was meant to convey to me that Atari was either working in the background to keep its spirit alive or secretly ruling the entire industry from the shadows.

Back then, my perception was that each console and computer existed in an entirely separate universe and had no natural compatibility with any of the others, and that's why I was so amazed to find that a modern Sega console contained an artifact of a console that was made by a completely different company in a completely different era.

"What world is this?" I wondered.


So for the first time, I was playing Sonic the Hedgehog in my own home (and for some reason, I was doing so in our basement; this seems strange to be because it was usually the case that my brother restricted me from being there).

Like I said in my inaugural Super Mario Bros. piece: There was always something magical and surreal about your first in-home experience with a console. There was something special about being able to get to know a console in the most personal, most intimate of settings. That's how I felt about my first session with my newly owned Genesis. It was a magical experience.

Suddenly, in a scenario that I couldn't have envisioned when I woke up that morning, I was playing Sonic the Hedgehog in my own home. I was seeing its lush, luminous visuals on the screen of a TV that belonged to me. I was hearing its uniquely synthesized, exceptionally vibrant music in a space that I never imagined would welcome its reverberations. I could hardly believe that any of it was happening.

Admittedly, I was still somewhat resentful of the Genesis (the "belligerent black box," as I thought of it), and there was a part of me that felt as though spending time with it was tantamount to betraying my beloved Nintendo systems, which for years had been unfairly maligned by Sega's marketing. Though, I refused to let that feeling prevail because I believed (much like I do now) that being a true enthusiast meant that you had to be unbiased and give each game and console a fair chance. You couldn't ignore or dismiss great video-game products for petty reasons, no; by behaving that way, I knew, all you were doing was stupidly robbing yourself of amazing experiences.

So I made sure to put my ill feelings aside and focus on deriving maximum enjoyment from my new Genesis and Sonic the Hedgehog, both of which I held in high regard (even if I was loath to admit it).

And for about a year and a half, I was a Genesis-owner, and I played Sonic regularly. And in that time, I had a lot of fun with both products. I was happy to have them in my home. The only regret I have is that I didn't get to spend more time with them. Selling my Genesis, I realize now, was a bad decision. I shouldn't have done it. There were plenty of better ways in which I could have acquired $100.

Oh well.


"So how 'bout the game, itself?" you ask. "You ever gonna talk about that, you rambling freak?"

Well, certainly. I was just getting there.

So for me, Sonic the Hedgehog was all about Green Hill Zone and its three stages, all of which were ingeniously constructed and unmatched visually and aesthetically. They were among the best, most brilliant stages ever created, and I believed that it was worth playing Sonic just to see them, alone--just to play through them and experience the excitement of blasting your way across their richly colored, mesmerizingly-twisted-and-contoured environments and uninhibitedly speeding your way toward their endpoints in a symphony of motion; just to know the exhilaration of bouncing and propelling yourself high into the sky and soaring through the air at super speeds and doing do without having any idea where or how far your momentum was going to carry you; and just to know how thrilling it was to perfectly arc around every slope, find every correct angle, barely clear the most deadly obstructions, and succeed in swiftly and cleanly arriving at the goal.

These stages and the style of action they produced were instantly iconic and absolutely unforgettable.

Green Hill Zone Act 1, on its own, did incredibly well to hit all of the high notes and show you what Sonic was all about. It gave you the most perfect distillation of the game's action: You collected rings, you whipped around loop-the-loops, you rocketed through narrow tunnels, and you obtain power-ups that granted you shielding and temporary invincibility. The stage's open level design invited you to experiment with Sonic's abilities and find out what you could do with them, and at the same time, it communicated to you that the stage had multiple paths that you could take if you were comfortable with exploration. And its musical theme (the magnificent Green Hill Zone) masterfully conveyed the game's joyous, effervescent spirit while amplifying the brightness of the stage environments--the lush greenery, the shiny checkered textures, the glistening ocean water, and the gleaming pointed mountains--and making them all the more entrancing.

This stage also offered players their best chance at earning access to the secret zone--an impressively crafted marble-maze that rotated all around you, in breathtaking fashion, and changed its rotation as you rolled and bounced your way through it. Honestly, I hadn't the faintest clue as to what the secret zone's significance was or what the "Chaos Emeralds" were supposed to be, so all I could was make guesses. I unconfidently guessed that clearing a secret zone earned you an extra continue, and years later, I discovered that I was actually correct; and this surprised me because I was usually bad at instinctually deciphering the meaning of unexplained game mechanics (the manual explains how the secret zone works, yes, but back then, I didn't have access to the manual; both Dominick and Eric threw their Sonic manuals away).

I loved to look at the mazes and observe how they moved, but I didn't enjoy navigating through them. They made me nervous, and it was inevitable that I'd panic and proceed to lose control of Sonic; and consequently I'd roll into one of the zone's terminating "Goal" lines and miss out on the prize. That's why I was happy to avoid the secret zones and why I would never get upset when a giant ring wasn't waiting for me at a stage's endpoint.

But still I considered the secret zone to be super-cool and one of the game's defining elements.


But that's about where my deepest fondness for Sonic ended. I felt that the rest of the game trended downhill and that none of the other zones contained anything as striking or as memorable as what was on display in Green Hill Zone. (This is why I tend to focus so heavily on Green Hill Zone whenever I talk about Sonic. It's much more special than the rest.)

The Marble Zone was a good example: Its visuals were eye-catching and enchanting, certainly, but its platforming elements (the oscillating pillars, protruding platforms, falling blocks and crushing spike beds) were too safe and familiar, and its passages were so cramped and clogged that they functioned to completely kill the fast, exciting pace that Green Hill Zone had done so well to establish. It turned Sonic into a regular ol' platformer.

The proceeding Spring Yard Zone was even worse because it contained numerous sets of slow-moving oscillating platforms that forced you to stand there and wait. It was determined to constrain your movement and deemphasize the game's most appealing aspect.

At times, Sonic would introduce inventive platforming mechanics and enable you to launch and toss yourself in fun new ways, yeah, but still it continued to trend more and more in the direction of slower-paced precision platforming, which just wasn't its strength. Its controls were simply too sensitive and too hyperactive for that type of platforming. Sonic was slippery, and his aerial movement was stiff and thus difficult to modulate (and it didn't help that the hit-detection was unfavorable).

This style of action just didn't work well in Sonic.

The biggest offender, though, was the Labyrinth Zone, which contained the game's dreaded "underwater" stages. Underwater stages were usually the worst part of any platformer, but they were especially bad here because of the multiple ways in which they inhibited you: They slowed you down tremendously, they hampered Sonic's movement controls, and they introduced a sadistic air-replenishment system that required you to have to constantly find and inhale air bubbles lest you'd drown. The air-replenishment system was the biggest problem because it worked to discourage exploration and forced you to have to spend a lot of time standing still and waiting for the air-granting large bubbles to spawn.

It was bad enough that I could never find a bubble-spawner when I needed one--when that dire-sounding, panic-inducing countdown music would begin to play--but it was absolutely exasperating when I'd find one and the damn thing would refuse to spawn a large bubble! Stuff like that made the Labyrinth Zone stressful rather than fun. It made me dread playing through them.

And by the time I'd reach Labyrinth Zone Act 3's Robotnik segment--an irritating chase sequence in which you had to zigzag your way through a series of narrow tunnels while avoiding stabbing spears and wall-mounted fire-spewing statue heads--I'd be ready to check out and move on to another game. I'd grow tired of being forced to advance slowly and meticulously. I desired to blast my way across sloped surfaces, whip around loop-the-loops, and bounce and launch myself high into the air, but the game wouldn't let me do that. Instead it was intent on finding new ways to constrain my movement and move away from what the things it did best.


But these unfortunate design choices didn't ruin Sonic for me, no. I still enjoyed playing it, and I still considered it to be one of the best platformers in existence. It was just that I was disappointed that its last six zones weren't quite as great as its first one.

I was so enamored with Green Hill Zone's stages that I felt as though it was worth buying and playing Sonic just to experience them. They were that special. And I found Act 1, in particular, to be so outstanding that I made sure to place it on my "Most Memorable Opening Stages" list alongside the iconic Stage 1s from Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros., Contra, Castlevania and Doom. It was one of the best ever.

"So what about Sonics 2 and 3?" you ask in an aggressively inquisitive manner. "You think highly of them, too, right?"

Well, I like them, yes, but not anywhere near as much as I like the original. They look a bit better and have more content, but I don't think that they're better games. They're purely iterative, and I don't feel as though they do anything that the original didn't already do at a high level. To me, Sonic the Hedgehog is tops. It does the best job of expressing the series' ideas.

That's not to say that Dominick and I didn't have a lot of fun with the sequels. We did! We played them a lot, and we always had a great time with their cooperative and competitive multiplayer modes. I, personally, was fascinated with Sega's Lock-On technology and the ways in which it altered the three games. I regarded it as a product of sorcery. "How can you make a character appear in a game that he wasn't in originally?!" I'd wonder while struggling to fathom the technology. "How is it even possible?!"

So it's not that we didn't think that the sequels were great, no. We just thought that the original was better.


During the following 10-year stretch, I was mostly a passive observer of Sonic's activities, so I'm not entirely sure when his games started to go off the rails. The only thing I could say with certainty was that I didn't find any of them as appealing as his 16-bit games. They just didn't have the same spirit. And they seemed to forget what made the originals so great.

My opinion is that Sonic games make the most sense when they (a) place the Blue Blur in colorful, fantastical worlds that have their own unmistakable aesthetic and (b) allow him to interact with landforms, obstacles and characters that are exclusive to those worlds. I can't understand why the series' development team (Sonic Team) is so intent on inserting him into dark, despotic worlds that have realistic qualities and are populated by human characters, among whom he looks desperately out of place. If this is what "growing up" is supposed to mean for Sonic, then Sega is better served to supply him a youth potion that keeps him young forever. Doing that will keep him where he belongs and allow for his series to regain its distinct personality and alluringly cheerful spirit.

I hold out hope that Sonic Team will realize that it's moving in the wrong direction and consequently return Sonic to his roots and build upon the formulas that made fans fall in love with him.

That's what the character deserves.


For the longest time, I resented Sonic and what he stood for. I saw him as the symbol of the mindless tribalism that had formed within the gaming community and turned it into a nasty place. These days, though, I can see that my resentment was entirely misplaced. Sonic wasn't really the cause of the problem. The true culprit, rather, was Tom Kalinske (Sega of America's former CEO). His identity-centered marketing campaign was what was actually responsible for the creation of the awful "my choice of game console signifies my social status" ideology that so-called "hardcore gamers" adopted and thereafter used to denigrate any game or platform that didn't fall within the narrow scope of what they considered to be "cool" and "mature."

It was that campaign that convinced kids to close their minds to other platforms and dismiss some of the greatest games ever made because they were either "too cute" or not bloody enough. It was that campaign that forever tainted Nintendo's name and, perhaps karmically, created the conditions for Sega's downfall; mainly, it provided Sony, the new kid on the block, an effective strategy for destroying companies' reputations, and Sony used that strategy to stigmatize Sega in the same way. (I refuse to revel in the irony because I actually like Sega and wish that it were still a console-manufacturer. I'll take Sega over these new cats any day.)

And what was left was an industry whose products were now marketed exclusively to angry 12-year-olds, rebellious teens, and all other kinds of emotional children, none of whom would ever be caught dead playing a colorful, cartoony game like Sonic the Hedgehog.

So great job, Tom! You succeeded in making the video-game world an ugly place and wrecking two of the industry's greatest pioneers.


I don't, however, have any contempt for Sonic, no. I've long since made peace with him. He and I are cool.

Truthfully, I always respected Sonic. Even back in the old days, when I was apt to curse his name and sneer at the sight of him, I couldn't deny that I found him to be an appealing character and that I was drawn to him.

And what also never changed is my strong appreciation for his original Genesis game, of which I've been a big fan ever since that summer day in 1991 when it raced into my life and astonished me with its amazing visuals, next-level music, and ingeniously new style of gameplay. Today, just like I did way back then, I consider it to be one of the best platformers ever made.

To me, the 16-bit era was never about Mario versus Sonic or the nasty console war. Rather, it was about being wowed by new technology and enjoying new types of experiences. That's what I loved about it. That's what made it one of the best times in gaming. And Sonic the Hedgehog was a big reason why it was so great. It set the tone. It showed us the true potential of 16-bit machines. And it encapsulated everything that was great about the era. That's what made it so special.

And for Sonic and I, the 16-bit era was the starting point of a long relationship that had more twists and turns than any of the green hills you'd ever come across on Mobius.


It was a wild ride, and in the end, Sonic and I wound up becoming great friends. We created a bond that'll last a lifetime.

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