[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 Oma Keeling. Oma is a freelance writer, artist and art historian. They run GlitchOut, a blog dedicated to altered and alternative game experiences. Find them on Twitter @GlitchOutMain and @OKthanksgames. They also previously wrote for Super Chart Island about Euro 2004.]
I don’t like Sonic the Hedgehog, the game.
I do like Sonic the Hedgehog, the hedgehog, but, try as I might, every time I play a version of his first appearance in video games from 1991 I’m reminded of all the things I very much don’t enjoy about playing them.
I’ve never played the Mega Drive version of the iconic side-scrolling platformer though, only ports of it in the two copies of Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection I own, and now in the PS2’s Sonic Mega Collection Plus, each time being surprised, and eventually frustrated by its difficulty.
The problem for me, which many would say is the point of the game, is specifically the insistence on speed when it has every intent on slowing you down. In the sluggishness of Sonic’s run-ups, the gummy, tacky feeling controls, and the adjoining interaction with a world composed of ways to take your gold coins and kill you, is an experience that is too much like life itself.
Sonic has been referred to as an icon for kids with ADHD, and as an adult living with the condition the ability to relate to him remains. I’m approaching this review with his spirit, having promised to do it several months ago, it being somewhere on my mind the whole time, and then having been reminded the day before it’s due, I can now do nothing else. My experience of the condition is as something that makes life prohibitively hard, since every day contains about a hundred things like this review, which will only get done if I focus on them and them alone over a period of fixation, in which I cross my legs, lean in and ignore that I’ve had to go to the toilet for over an hour, and have pins and needles and… I’ll be right back.
Sonic’s fixation is Dr. Eggman/Robotnik’s evil plan, and so he’s traversing zones at high speeds to get to the end of this very important thing, that if he finishes will improve his life and the lives of the whole world, and everything will seem fresh and new once he does the dishes… but hold up what’s all this bullshit in his way? Spiky caterpillars and wikipedia pages on the history of New York’s water supply? Crab hazards and unreturned Tinder messages? I’ve dropped all my gold rings in the lava and I’m in my overdraft? Again?!
The only way to ignore it is to simply not encounter it. To glide over it, going as quickly as possible. That’s when the game’s good, when it releases the brakes and Sonic is essentially just moving across empty space going from A – B, because that’s when life is good. If you’re not an expert in the game’s maps though, that’s a rare occasion in between falling onto the same spikes 3 times in a row. For some that’s great stuff, good design based on animal behaviourism, you learn to not get shocked so you get a cookie; I just get shocked.
One moment of this that stands out is at the very start of Green Hill Zone: Act 2, the game’s second level. You stand on a grassy area to the left of a bridge and have to head right. This should be a simple start to your momentum, but before the bridge is a large rock, there in your way. It looks like it should be background art, because why would you put that in front of your speed based character’s first few steps? Then it cuts you short as you collide with it.
There’s the whole design philosophy, get in the player’s way, and while there’s merits to that I’d contest that Sonic the Hedgehog doesn’t make it fun, and only continues looking good doing it the first ten or twenty times before I’m bored of it visually.
As a game even Dark Souls is more generous with its admittance that “Hey, you’re only human.” in the amount of slack it gives you. There’s something to be said about the way in which both games present different versions of the horror of a world just waiting to kill you. While I find Sonic to be just as intentionally difficult in its construction, its rhythms and aesthetic universe are designed exclusively around frenetic forward momentum. Sonic does not fear death, in comparison to FromSoft’s intentional attempts to put that fear in you by patiently revealing all of the ways they’re going to kill you.
Sonic the Hedgehog thus carries with it its mightily accumulated cultural relevance, along with a brutally speedy memento mori for someone like me.
Gotta go fast, or die.
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