[This post is part of a collaborative Sonic retrospective based around the games on Sonic Mega Collection Plus. To read more, please head over to the central post!
This one is written by Martin F, who most recently wrote about Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri]
I recently watched a 45 minute long YouTube video called “how many Super Mario games are there?”, which, as the video explains, is a much harder question to answer than you might think. It starts by laying out the full list of games which are more or less universally agreed to be a part of the core Super Mario series of platformers (a surprisingly short list), then delves into increasingly obscure rabbit holes of other, more contested inclusions, expanding fractally as various spinoffs, remakes and rereleases are brought into focus. If you have the time, and the interest in obscure video game trivia that I assume you must have if you are reading this, I would recommend giving it a watch.
It is with this video in mind that I make the following statement: Blue Sphere is a Sonic the Hedgehog game. This seems like a perfectly reasonable statement to make, but it’s also one in which every noun is to some degree debatable. Firstly; “Sonic the Hedgehog”. It’s a game in which you control the character Sonic the Hedgehog, sure, but does that make it a Sonic the Hedgehog game? Is Super Smash Bros. Brawl a Sonic the Hedgehog game? Is Sega Club Wacky Worlds Creativity Studio? You could probably make a 45 minute YouTube video on the subject. I’d watch it.
Second; “Blue Sphere”. This is the title under which the game appears on the Sonic Mega Collection Plus, but it’s not a title the game was originally released with. The name Blue Sphere first appeared on previous compilation Sonic Jam, released in 1997, some three years after the release of Sonic & Knuckles that first rendered this game playable. For those three years, the game had no apparent name, just the imperative “Get Blue Spheres!” that appears on the menu screen after you performed the necessary arcane ritual to summon this daemon of esoterica.
I mean, seriously, this shit is bananas; in order to access this nameless beast in 1994, you would need to acquire a copy of the game Sonic & Knuckles, and a copy of the original Sonic the Hedgehog, lock them together and insert them into your console (Mega Drive? Genesis? True names must not be spoken in this realm), at which point you will be greeted by the wagging finger of Sonic, flanked by cohorts Tails, Knuckles and Dr. Robotnik, and the following message, scrolling across the screen and endlessly repeating, like a snake eating its own tail:
“No way! No way! No way! No way?”
If, without being given any prompt to do so, you were to press every button on your controller at the same time, only then would you be granted access to the nether realms of the Blue Sphere. And so we come to our final debated noun; ‘game’.
The gameplay of Blue Sphere involves running around a 32×32 square, where both horizontal and vertical edges wrap around to the other side, collecting blue spheres and avoiding red ones. This would be recognisable to most Sonic fans as being drawn from the special stages of Sonic 3 (& Knuckles), those which must be traversed to obtain the Chaos Emeralds and achieve full completion. The idea of achieving full completion in Blue Sphere, however, is simply laughable. There are a total of 134,217,728 levels in Blue Sphere, which, even given a rather generous estimate of just one minute for average completion time, would take a little over 250 years of play time to complete. In fairness, by completing a level with a perfect score, the game advances you ten levels ahead instead of one, so I guess we can knock that down to only 25 years of non-stop, perfect play. Do you think anybody has ever played, say, level 87,369,117 of Blue Sphere? If a level exists in the programming of a game and nobody is there to play it, does it make a sound?
Blue Sphere is not so much a game as the negative space outside of game, out of bounds and without boundaries, a glitch in the matrix. It takes a game within a game, removes it from all context and stretches it beyond the realm of human limitation to become a game without a game, a hundred million endless sprawling voids that can, in fact, be measured at roughly 32 square meters, each one twisted around itself to form the shape of a snake eating its own tail.