I’ve just never been a huge Sonic person, and I didn’t understand/realize how much they had developed all these characters in the world. I never watched the cartoon in the 90s and didn’t read any of the old comics either. I just played the games and was like, what’s the big deal? He runs fast!
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I used to watch the show, so I had a bit more affinity for the character than the games, but having played more of the games the whole thing has clicked recently. I started to finally understand the appeal of the games and the what the designers were aiming for with each iteration and I appreciate it now. I used to think there was no platforming, just running and I understand I was wrong. Plus I love the boss fights and Sonic Frontiers was such a delight in that regard.
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That’s how I feel about Mario, to be fair. I just don’t get the appeal.
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We all have flaws, it’s OK
I’m kidding. It kind of seems like Sonic is a way more fleshed out universe than Mario to be honest. I’ve always liked the Mario games better, so I’ve just always been a Mario person. That’s all just subjective of course.
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Mario sucks. Hardcore sucks. Like, he’s not a cool dude. Fun platforming? Hell yes. Can I play as any character other than Mario? Thank fucking god! Get Mario out of here. Honestly any character from the series is more interesting than Mario, and some are light years better.
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While I wouldn’t put it quite as hardcore, yeah I agree. Horrible design, boring characterisation, uninspired world design and the platforming… honestly, I’ve never found it much fun. I’ve tried several times to understand why people love Mario, but I honestly just don’t get it.
But let’s not turn this into a Mario bashing thread. I think they are simply hugely different characters who just happen to both be in platformers.
It kind of seems like Sonic is a way more fleshed out universe than Mario to be honest
Most of that has to do with the comics and animated shows. While there is some cool lore stuff on the games - particularly Knuckles stuff, Chaos/ Chao stuff, Shadow stuff - SEGA is seemingly willing to throw any and all of that to the four winds on a whim. Frontiers suggest they might be taking it moderately more seriously now, but we’ll see…
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I should be clear, I think Mario games are superb platformers for different reasons than what makes Sonic superb platformers, but I dislike Mario as a character.
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I was Team Sega as a kid (there were dozens of us), and yeah, part of the appeal of Sonic was that he was cool. He goes fast of course, and that was certainly exciting (the 16-bit era was really starting to show what it could do that the 8-bit era simply couldn’t) – but Sonic had more of a personality to latch on to compared to most other game mascots at the time. He’s not just a good and noble hero – he’s got spunk. He’s impatient and reckless, but he’ll face any danger for the sake of his friends (and by extension, animals and nature in general). He fit right at home in the era of Transformers, Ninja Turtles, and Power Rangers.
Mario is a bit of a Mickey Mouse type in that his personality is… nice. And he goes on fun adventures. Nowadays I’d argue this is perfectly fine actually (at least for a video game), but I think for lots of kids they eventually reach a point where they want a little more peril in their entertainment. Some higher stakes (explosions! real weapons! the whole world in danger!), plus a bit more of a setting and some lore for their imaginations to work with. There’s a relative samey-ness to the Mario levels, which generally feel like they exist for the sake of being video game levels, while every level in the Sonic games feels like its own unique and fully-realized locale in a strange and exciting loop-da-loop-filled world. And you’re not just fighting monsters – you’re freeing animal pals from the robots that now patrol these imaginative environments. What’s that goo Robotnik is concocting in the chemical plant? Did he take over a gaudy casino land, or build it himself? What’s he doing in those caves – digging for the mysterious Chaos Emeralds? Did he seriously fill an entire bay with oil? What’s with those underwater ruins? Or the trippy “special stage” dimension? There’s just enough material to get the gears turning in the minds of children.
The cartoons at the time definitely added more to Sonic’s character, which to some degree (perhaps a significant one) I think the creators in Japan were not expecting. (A similar thing happened with Mario in his cartoons actually, though I’d say Nintendo was even more thorough in ignoring it all.) But in the Sonic cartoons (and subsequently, the comics), our hero not only defeats the bad guys – he mocks them while doing so. When handled well, Sonic could be not only entertaining, but even funny – something approaching a Bugs Bunny-esque trickster. The fact Sonic’s character designer went with the likes of Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat as primary inspirations makes the juxtaposition stand out in kids’ minds, though likely only subconsciously.
The games ended up not ever really knowing what they wanted to do with Sonic story-wise though. I get the impression that for the most part, an overarching plot was never really a priority for the devs. So the games followed a loose continuity at best, almost never acknowledging past entries. For a while it felt like each new game was practically a reboot with an asterisk, that asterisk being “you can imagine the other games you liked also happened, why not.” Is the world of the games Mobius, as it was called in the cartoons and comics? Or is the world Earth? Or at least a “basically Earth,” as it seemed to be in Adventure onward, and especially so in Unleashed. (Interestingly, the anime Sonic X said screw it and went with an “isekai” premise, sending Sonic and his pals to our world in its first episode.)
Perhaps what stands out most about Forces then is that it suddenly brought back the idea that there are lots of Sonic OCs (uh, animal people? IDK what to call ‘em) in the world of the games after all. But I guess we’re left to headcanon that they were all just somewhere else during games like Adventure, Unleashed, etc. The incredibly messy nonsense of it all perhaps lends itself well to us hapless fools on internet forums who try to make sense of any of it. I’m not done playing Frontiers, but perhaps that will mark a shift in the series’ direction when it comes to storytelling. I feel like past events have been acknowledged more times during the first two islands of this game alone, than all past games have combined. IDK how well it will pay off, but it’s interesting to see.
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When I saw that video of Nicole Byer tearfully explaining what Sonic as a character meant to her, it was a real light-bulb moment. I wasn’t diagnosed with ADD until adulthood, but in hindsight I suspect that’s a huge reason Sonic resonated so much with me. I had to have speech therapy because I talked so quickly that I’d stumble over words or forget to take breaths. Especially in the comics and cartoons, Sonic’s inability to slow down is both a power and a flaw. That was empowering and comforting to see… still is, if I’m honest.
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I’ve never looked at the games/ films or character in this light and even as someone without ADD or ADHD, it is very moving to see that this can have such an impact beyond what you would call typical fandom.
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The thing with Sonic lore as it stands in the games is that with a little thought and care it could have actually worked! For example, the reasons Robotnik/ Eggman was the only human in the games until Adventure was because they all took place on (relatively) isolated islands and locations. Adventure and games set after are set on the worlds’ various main landmasses.
If they had have kept Classic Sonic as being a younger Modern Sonic (which is how I still choose to view him) then the various instances of Classic and Modern meeting would be much cleaner, and it would give much more import to the Phantom Ruby from Forces.
I’ve got a huge head cannon for all this that I really should write out one day, but I double anyone would actually be interested. 
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Nicole Byer is the best, I love that Polygon article, and I can understand how significant this kind of identification and representation can be to a person.
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Bits of my “headcanon” were definitely along these lines, and to some extent felt intended at the time (namely Sonic simply being a bit older in Adventure, and not meant to be a different Sonic from the classic games… though that kind of got un-retconned in Frontiers? [they literally show a screenshot from S3&K as a memory at one point?] IDK anymore lol).
But yeah, it’s not too hard to just say the Sonic OCs live on various islands, while cities on the mainland or what have you are populated by people (of varying degrees of cartoon-styling). Adventure feels slightly tricky to explain away, but I guess you can go with: Sonic was chilling at a Station Square hotel (so, on a beach vacation), Tails was building a plane at his Mystic Ruins workshop (he seems to have several scattered about), and Amy… well, it’s implied she was doing a bunch of shopping, so perhaps we can go with Station Square vacation for her as well (just so coincidentally the same time as Sonic being there though? very suspicious, but perhaps in-character).
I remember enjoying discussions about Sonic Adventure 2, and it kind of being accepted that Gerald Robotnik must have inspected the ruins of Angel Island at some point. The mural from S3&K depicts Sonic with Chaos Emerald power, while the mural from Sonic Adventure depicts Chaos with it. The experiments that led to Shadow and the Biolizard being created more or less feel like attempts at harnessing the Chaos Emerald energy in forms that could do so effectively. (As nonsense as that all is, ha ha.)
It was a very brief time in Sonic’s gaming history where it felt like the devs were pushing for a grander overarching narrative, but then they followed up with the likes of Heroes, Shadow, and 06 which… yeah, they were winging everything. Not that that’s unique in the world of gaming. I’ve been playing through the Resident Evil series of games lately, and the overarching narrative there… yeah, they were winging everything, LOL. Clearly much easier said than done to keep such massive projects all tied together neatly, especially when you’re going to have different heads of staff from one to the next.
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Sega was hiring for someone to manage Sonic lore recently, and Ian Flynn said on a podcast that Sonic Team is abandoning the “two worlds” strategy going forward (so classic Sonic is young Sonic again), so maybe this’ll be more coherent going forward!
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Your comments regarding Eggman actually reminded me of a one-off promotional comic that was created when the original Sonic game released in North America (and apparently influenced the Sonic comic series in the UK). The basic gist of it is that Sonic was pals with a scientist named Dr. Kintobor, who created a machine to absorb all the world’s negative energy into some emeralds. Sonic assists by running on a treadmill to power the device (and goes so fast he turns blue, and also destroys his shoes – Kintobor creates Sonic’s red sneakers as replacements). One day though the machine short-circuits and all the gathered negative energy flows into Kintobor, turning him evil (and since he happened to be holding an egg at the moment, he gained his Eggman appearance as well). Kintobor has flipped into Robotnik, and proceeds to be a mad scientist who puts animals in robots etc etc. Sonic of course vows to stop him, and the comic says now go buy the game to find out how that all pans out.
It’s unfortunately a concept that is never actually brought up in the games, but this premise always struck me as a clever way to explain Sonic never defeating Robotnik for good – Kintobor is his friend after all, and he wants to find a way to return the 'ol doc back to normal. It also just makes for more engaging conflict, and there’s even an interesting theme built into the inciting incident: don’t tamper with the balance of nature, even with the best of intentions.
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Ah, yes, the good ol’ “Kintobor” origin. Honestly, I’ve always found it pretty silly, even by Sonic standards, but it’s much better than the convoluted mess that is the Japanese origin.
I live in hope that one day we’ll get a proper origin for Sonic, but until then I just stick with “wanderer who became a hero”
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This is just my personal opinion, but I always find it way more compelling when stories with clearly defined “heroes” and “villains” do not have a shared past. I think the Joker is more interesting when he’s a mystery, not the man who killed (or even had a grudge with) the Waynes. I thought Rey was way more interesting when she was just some orphan and not anyone’s relative or force bond or anything. It always feels like a lazy shortcut to building in personal stakes to me. (I think it also gives real-life high-powered psychopaths and genocidal maniacs far too much credit in terms of their motives.)
So I’ve personally always found it way more compelling to just say that Dr. Robotnik is a maniacal inventor and industrialist, and Sonic and his friends are fighting back. Maybe their powers are a result of his environmental crimes… I certainly thought that was the case as a kid when I played Sonic 2 and saw a two-tailed fox swimming in pink chemicals. I just don’t think they need to have been specific lab experiments or anything: It’s enough to have them be underdogs. I don’t need Robotnik to have invented Sonic’s shoes or whatever.
That said, everyone has their own amount of unanswered questions and suspension of disbelief they can embrace when consuming fiction. I don’t enjoy Ratatouille because I could never get over how a rat would control a person’s hands by pulling their hair.
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I’m not really talking about accepted “canon,” just generally about the various versions of Sonic’s origin presented across media.
Right, I was saying what I assumed to be the case when I was playing Sonic 2 back in 1992. I think that’s a better story.
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