Sonic's Speed Losing Momentum

Being a child in the ’90s meant picking sides—boys vs. girls, cats vs. dogs, *NSYNC vs. the Backstreet Boys (and you know you have all of their records) and, most importantly, Sonic vs. Mario.

The iconic mascots of Sega and Nintendo, Sonic and Mario dueled throughout the early parts of the last decade—the winner would get to claim that it was indeed he who had the most “baditude.” Sonic the Hedgehog was a worthy challenger to Super Mario World’s platformer hegemony, and Sega’s hedgehog was designed in a way that made him the hip, fun alternative to the chubby Italian plumber who did shrooms before it was cool. Well, times have changed, and Mario has remained great—perhaps even greater than he ever was—while Sonic has become a horrific mess, whored out across a number of platforms and lacking a good game to his name in the last 10 years. Sega and Sonic fans need to move on—Sonic is dead, and Sega has killed him.

With the release of Sonic Unleashed, Sonic’s newest adventure, it’s completely and totally official: Sonic is stuck in an endless cycle of being awful. It seems like Sega has completely lost sight of what made the blue hedgehog’s adventures good. They’ve emphasized mindless speed over the fun mix of speed, platforming, and exploration that the original Sonic games on the Sega Genesis featured. Unleashed represents the grossest misinterpretation of the original games yet—beautiful sidescrolling levels that move so fast they are practically on autopilot mixed with atrocious God of War-style combat sections in which Sonic turns into a “werehog.” Hey, Sega, where was this werehog junk in the original games?

Speaking of the original games, why has Sega loaded the new games with Sonic’s furry friends? In the Genesis days, Tails, the obnoxious little fox creature with two tails (get it? Tails? Because he has tails?) followed Sonic around throughout Sonic the Hedgehog 2, but he never spoke, and you were never forced to play as him. In fact, he was a welcome addition—a second player (like your friend who wasn’t totally there upstairs enough to take the reins of Sonic) could control Tails and play with you. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 in 1994 introduced Knuckles the Echidna, but he also didn’t speak, and he played relatively similar to Sonic. In the new games, Sega insists on pumping these games up with the most obnoxiously voiced, irritatingly slow abortive characters to keep Sonic company—Amy Rose, Sonic’s furry girlfriend who was clearly designed with Internet sexual deviants in mind, Big the Cat, Chip the Ice Cream-Loving Amorphous Thing, Who-Cares the Robot, Crappy the Big Pile of Crap­—the list goes on and on and on.

Why has Sega gone wild with what critics have dubbed “Sonic and his Shitty Friends”? The answer might be simple, but it might not be. There’s always the possibility that Sega and Sonic Team, the developer of Sonic games now for over 10 years, have just completely lost the plot. They could be a talentless group of coders stuffed into a tiny Japanese office while corporate overlords force them to model versions of characters designed by pedophile focus groups. On the other hand, there’s the possibility that what made the games good in 1991 doesn’t work so well in 2008. The original Sonic was a game that players could race through in an hour or two if they knew what they were doing. A $60 game today that you could beat in two hours would sell like a rock, so Sega pads their fairly solid game up with a werehog and shitty friends—soon, we have the eight-hour experience from hell.

If Sega were to realize that Sonic was not just about speed, maybe they could get somewhere. The way they look at their own classic games is so reductive and simple that it is hard to believe that this is the company that made the original masterpieces. To suggest that Sonic is just about going fast (and in the process produce the crimes against humanity Sonic 2006, Sonic and the Secret Rings, Sonic Unleashed, Sonic Heroes, and Shadow the Hedgehog) is the same as suggesting Mario is just about going from left to right. Sega has the ability to slow Sonic down—but they don’t. Either they don’t know how or they don’t want to. I don’t know, maybe the Internet deviant market is bigger than we think.