The chart commentary in the September 1991 issue of Computer & Video Games noted astonishment at Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog, a console game, placing as high as #11 in the UK all formats sales chart. Sonic’s impact didn’t immediately show up on the charts beyond that, but by the start of 1995, games on consoles would make up more than 50% of the UK’s market, and the Sega Mega Drive console would be the clear leader. This fits with personal anecdata – between my brother and me we had four friends with Mega Drives and not one with a SNES, Nintendo’s rival console. Every one of those friends played Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic the Hedgehog 2. I can remember the attention around the release of Sonic 2 as greater than any other game back then, ‘Sonic 2sday’ and all, and I didn’t even have a console. Looking back, the whole idea of Sonic 2sday – a unified international release date (on, obviously, a Tuesday) – was a telling detail.
The UK was unusual in the Sega Mega Drive (or, as Americans like to call it, the ‘Sega Genesis’) being the clear market leader rather than Nintendo’s SNES, and the reasons go back into the ‘80s. Nintendo’s Famicom/NES console was utterly dominant in Japan, as my looks at the chart #1s there have shown, and in the US it famously saved the whole video games industry after the American Video Game Crash of 1983 (or, as Americans like to call it, the ‘Video Game Crash of 1983’). As I explained back in my post on Ghosts’n’Goblins, we were in the middle of a boom time for home computer games, and Nintendo didn’t have anything like the same impact in the UK. They frequently could barely be bothered with us at all, although the order of cause and effect there is not 100% clear. Most likely it was a self-reinforcing cycle. Without such a base elsewhere to fall back on, Sega put in a lot more effort. The release dates in different countries of Sonic the Hedgehog and Nintendo’s archetypal mascot rival Super Mario World, both playable on their snazzy new 16-bit consoles, tell their own story:
In Japan, Sonic was definitely taking on the incumbent. In the US, he got in first in this particular battle, but Mario was so popular from before it didn’t matter too much. In the UK, that wasn’t the case and by the time the SNES and Super Mario World came out, Sonic was well-established and Sonic 2 was just around the corner. Sega weren’t going to rescue the British games industry, because it still didn’t need rescuing, but like Sonic’s new flying fox sidekick Tails in Sonic 2, they would give it some lifts into different directions.
Like the last massively influential Sega game in our story, OutRun, Sonic was made with America and Europe in mind, but in this case it wasn’t as a location but as an audience. Sonic was a hybrid creation with input from Sega of America alongside Sega of Japan, and turned out to be perfect for Britain as well. With Sega having their own console for Sonic to be on, there wasn’t any question of playing inferior home versions, or at least not ones that were actually Sonic. At that time Sega in Japan gave the American and European branches of Sega pretty much free rein in marketing, which meant being able to run more easily with things that they thought might work better here (Ayrton Senna and his Sonic trophy at the Sega European Grand Prix, crude sexist adverts in Viz, and all). A year on from Sonic 2, we got our own British fortnightly Sonic the Comic which ran until 2002, and which my brother and a couple of the previously mentioned Sonic-playing friends were regular readers of. I was never as big a fan of Sonic as of Mario, but as a Brit the hedgehog felt more like ours. For many British people, like for me, Sonic the Hedgehog got to be the powerful introduction to console games.
This was the series that got to represent the advantages of having specialised hardware designed solely for playing games. Further than that, the advantage of the same people designing both the hardware and the games to run on it. Sonic didn’t represent a complete revolution of unrecognisable possibilities, but it was obvious that it was a new way of doing things and a different type of experience. That experience wasn’t the one single console experience, or one single console platform game experience, either. Mario is often about the intricate hidden possibilities that players can work out and open up within its world, but Sonic’s design philosophy, designed in opposition, places its intricate possibilities right at the surface and gives players little choice but to see them in action. Which is not to say it’s a shallower approach – Sonic has its own hidden secrets and multiple routes anyway – but certainly a different one. And Sonic 2 is an iteration further on the Sonic design philosophy than the original. Its colour-saturated world, and its array of toys and gimmicks to fast-forward Sonic around that world, are even more built up. It adds a rapidly charging spin-dash move so Sonic doesn’t have to rely on momentum to keep speed up, increasing the ratio of action to pause still further.
Sonic 2 has the Chemical Plant Zone, a marvel of criss-crossing accelerated paths that eschews any kind of straightforward left-right movement in favour of tying itself up into spatial knots and letting the player enjoy how they eventually get untied. It has the Casino Night Zone, the zenith of the entire concept of Sonic: platform game as literal pinball (with slot machines thrown in), with cities full of lights shimmering deliciously in the background, music of the most assured cool playing while vivid sound effects maintain a constant level of stimulation. It’s a place to drink everything in and forget the passage of time completely, just like they encourage you to in real casinos. It has so much more, more Zones, more everything. Sonic 2 is not flat out the best game I’ve covered so far, because different games do very different things and I prefer some of them, but Sonic 2 is a pretty much unbeatable at what it does. You only have to look at Zool again to see that trying to go toe-to-toe with Sonic 2 on a home computer was a laughably doomed venture.
In the UK, Sonic was the champion trailblazer and the one to match up to, and it’s only now that it’s It’s funny to think how much of that might have been a matter of release timing. But hey, you know what they say – gotta go fast!
There is, in fact, something ironic in Sonic being so successful here despite his famous speed being handicapped. Due to technical TV format issues, Mega Drive games, including Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic 2 alike, run at five-sixths speed on British consoles. For Sonic 2, Sega fixed the music alone to run at the correct speed, which is sort of a shame. I probably only prefer the slower version of Masato Nakamura’s incredible Green Hill Zone music in the original game because I’m used to it, but it remains brilliantly sparkling at either speed and when slowed down also gains a glorious otherworldly sheen. In a similar way, the slightly off speed boosts the haunting weirdness of Sonic the Hedgehog’s hallucinogenic bonus levels to a potency that Sega probably couldn’t have deliberately created if they’d tried. In Sonic 2, the bonus levels are replaced by showy 3D racing things and lack the same effect. Even still, the fact that in the UK we were literally playing different versions of the games is one more strange way in which they got to be ours.
Virgin all console formats chart, Teletext, 10 January 1993.
[See also this Gamesradar article confirming that it was #1 at Christmas 1992 in what was presumably the Gallup equivalent. I’m taking a leap based on remembered hype to assuming that it was overall #1 immediately after its release in November 1992]