In the late 80s and early 90s, Nintendo dominated the console market in a way that nobody since has even come close to. Five of the last six articles in this series have been about Nintendo games, and that is not an outlier; in 1992 they were estimated to control 80% of the American console market, and in a lawsuit brought by Atari over some of Nintendo’s less savory business practices1Including a policy, dropped in 1990, requiring games published on the NES be exclusive for at least two years. a jury ruled that Nintendo had “monopoly power” in the US games market.2https://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/16/business/company-news-nintendo-suit-by-atari-is-dismissed.html

The Sega Genesis3Or “Mega Drive” outside of North America was released in North America back in 1989, but despite being technologically superior had failed to make a dent in the popularity of the NES, and by 1991 it was already falling behind Nintendo’s own 16-bit system. And so, to avoid becoming an eternal footnote4Like the poor TurboGrafx-16 Sega decided on a new strategy. Nintendo had famously convinced retailers skeptical of video games after the 1983 crash that the NES was primarily a toy, and that it should be stocked and marketed accordingly. So, if Nintendo made toys for children, Sega saw an opening.

Of course, no amount of fast cars or Sega Screams or “blast processing”5Blast Processing is a nonsense marketing phrase that doesn’t mean anything. Recently, some people have attempted to claim that it did exist, technically, based on recent experiments, just no games ever used it and in fact doing so would be technically impossible without a Sega CD. These people are charlatans. Blast Processing is a marketing term; don’t fall for revisionism. was gonna move units unless there was a game just as cool to go with it. And so, Sonic The Hedgehog was born, the epitome of early 90s kid-friendly cool.

Sonic, above all else, is fast. It’s there in the name, it’s there in the ads. It’s the game’s primary selling point, and it’s what makes it stand out. Like, just look at this:

Regardless of whether or not the SNES could pull this off, it didn’t.6The slogan is Nintendon’t, not Nintencan’t, after all. And beyond the raw technical prowess, Sonic The Hedgehog makes a lot of choices to really sell this sense of speed. Sonic famously has an exaggerated sense of momentum to his movement, taking several seconds to build up to top speed; once he gets going fast you feel like you really earned it. There are lots of curves and slopes and loops to act as big set-pieces for going fast; you can see several in just the gif above. And the gorgeous layered backgrounds aren’t just a showcase of what the Genesis offers over 8-bit hardware, but also a good way to show Sonic’s movement in context even when he’s going so fast that he jumps above the regular level geometry.

Of course, going fast looks impressive, but it’s pretty easy to imagine how such speed might be more frustrating than fun when actually playing, with enemies and obstacles hitting you before you’ve even had a chance to see and react to them. And indeed, some of that does happen. However, Sonic makes a few choices to really help mitigate these drawbacks. First, the massive, sprawling levels often feature multiple paths. Unlike in most other platformers, missing a jump doesn’t have to mean death; it might simply result in you falling into a different path. And second, the game’s famous ring system. Last month we talked about how Yoshi added a neat wrinkle to the hit points in Mario; you could recover him, potentially without penalty, but only if you moved decisively into potential danger. Sonic takes this idea and runs7heh with it. If you take damage but have at least one ring you will survive the hit, and instead all your rings will fall out. You’ll have a few seconds to collect as many as you can before they all go away, so theoretically you can’t ever die, merely be inconvenienced. It’s a great way to have dangerous traps and also allow for reckless speed.

Well, at least in theory. Unfortunately Sonic doesn’t commit. Sure, you can fall of the stage, and land on a lower path…except for when you land in a bottomless bit instead. And yeah, taking damage has a safety net…except when it’s “squeeze” damage, where Sonic gets trapped between two moving walls, which is an instant death. And this game has the most aggressive squeeze system I have ever seen; you will die suddenly and, even knowing logically that it had to be a squeeze death have absolutely no idea what could have possibly triggered it. Also, several bosses don’t have any rings available between the final checkpoint and the encounter, so if you don’t beat them the first time you have to do it perfect.

And beyond undermining its own innovations, Sonic moves back the clock on lives. If you run out of lives, you start all over, from the very start of the game. You can collect “continues” in bonus stages, which allow you to restart the current level instead. But they’re a limited resource, and tricky to acquire. Unlike Mario, Sonic is not interested in helping you win. It is often a deeply frustrating game because of this.

So, because the game is so punishing of failure, your instinct is to play it cautiously, to advance slowly, to look before you leap. It’s a good way to avoid danger, and a good way to collect the rings necessary for both extra lives and access to bonus stages. But, if you play this way aren’t you defeating the entire point of Sonic? This is a game that’s supposed to be about going fast; why won’t it let me go fast?

And this is something of a contentious point. For reasons I’ll be getting into in future articles, Sonic is a series that’s been discoursed to death, so basically every possible take you could ever have on it already has an equal and opposite counter-take. There are plenty of people who can play fast, for whom rings and layers are more than enough to keep the momentum up. And it’s not just rote memorization; they can do the same with new Sonic games they’ve never played. But it’s also not just practice. Unlike a lot of games I’ve covered before, I’ve played a lot of Sonic The Hedgehog before. It was one of the first games I ever played as a kid. I’ve put dozens if not hundreds of hours into both it and 2D Sonic games in general. And yet it’s never clicked. Even my most recent playthrough, just a few weeks ago, ended in frustration.

I feel like at least part of this has to reflect badly on the game. Flexing about your Gamer Skills is the absolute worst thing a person could ever do8Except for the things that are worse, I suppose. but I’m not bad at platformers. I feel like if I can’t figure out your game after this many attempts, it’s maybe a bit obtuse. But also, let’s circle back to the top. Sonic The Hedgehog is cool. And the thing about cool is that it can’t be taught. You either have it or you don’t, and if you have to ask you’ll never know.

So in conclusion: