In 1991, video games began to be taken very seriously, and this golden age was notably illustrated by a legendary confrontation where Sega was not afraid to hit Nintendo whoever it touched one without moving the other, before Sony came to ridicule the two Japanese giants in 1995. At the heart of this console war, a blue hedgehog has its day of glory during the summer solstice: Sonic the Hedgehogborn to annihilate Super Mario, and who undoubtedly believed in it for the duration of a little masterpiece that unfortunately had no future.
Eager to get ahead of Nintendo, which humiliated it in the 8-bit generation with a Famicom/NES that sold six times better than the Master System, Sega unveiled the Mega Drive in the fall of 1988, two years earlier than the Super Nintendo. A bet that will work quite well in the United States in particular, where the machine (called Genesis in this territory) will sell better than the Super NES during their joint marketing period. But above all, under the leadership of Sega of America (who would later pay a high price), this success came at the cost of aggressive communication which will notably partly exploit what will eternally remain the mascot of a brand, and still is today: Sonic, the blue hedgehog.
The genèse d’un héros
First of all, a small disclaimer: we chose the date of June 21 to celebrate Sonic’s birthday because it seems to us to be the most relevant. It is in fact that of the very first release of Sonic the Hedgehog on Mega Drive in Europe, two days before the American release considered to be its real anniversary date. However, the blue hedgehog had already appeared on October 3, 1990 in Rad MobileSega’s arcade racing game of which it was… a rear-view mirror ornament on the cockpit view. But obviously, at that time, we were still unaware of the success that the Japanese manufacturer had in store for this fun decorative accessory, even if a first demo of the eponymous game featuring Sonic had been revealed in June 1990 in a Tokyo salon.
Indeed, when Rad Mobile Apparently, the destiny of this little blue mascot with a teasing, dangling smile is already clear, since the video game of which he will be the hero saw its development begin almost a year earlier, in November 1989. Faced with the success of Nintendo, clearly driven by that of Super Mario, the President of Sega, Hayao Nakayama, wanted his company to have its own mascot, declaring at the time that he wanted one who would be as well known as Mickey Mouse (which Mario would succeed in doing, as everyone knows). Of course, there is already Alex Kidd, but it is commonly accepted internally that the latter is not up to the task, and that a more modern hero is needed. The design of the blue hedgehog originally came from a competition within Sega, demanded by the firm, with the sole aim of designing what would be THE emblematic figure of the brand. This is how a little blue hedgehog was born, with relative unanimity, imagined by Naoto Ohshima and whose design sounds almost more American than Japanese, looks resolutely cool and whose trademark will be speed.
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Under the leadership of game designer Yuji Naka, to whom the authorship of Sonic is regularly attributed a little too unilaterally, Sega’s internal development unit, which would later become Sonic Team, then took a year and a half to design a platform game whose one and only goal was to ridicule and make Mario out of date. To clearly illustrate the obsession that this represented internally, the internal code name of the game was simply ” Defeat Mario HAS” ! Worn by a hero in sneakers whose main attribute is to run at crazy speed, this game intends to revolutionize a genre that rival Nintendo has appropriated and already mastered like the back of its hand, by making it decidedly more nervous, faster and closer to the arcade spirit so dear to Sega. Joined by level designer Hirokazu Yasuhara, Ohshima and Naka are preparing to revolutionize video games in their turn.
The different design stages clearly show the intention to draw inspiration from the reference, but to make it too soft or even too complex. First, to ensure that Sonic was truly fast, his default movement speed was modeled after Mario’s when running at maximum speed. As Sega’s new hero gains speed by moving without requiring the slightest press of a specific button, it is quickly decided under the leadership of Yasuhara that his gameplay will be simple and extremely accessible. Sonic the Hedgehog will be played with a single button, allowing him to jump and roll into a ball, without any offensive action since contact with the majority of enemies once in a ball will annihilate them.
Of course, the development of the title will not have been easy given Sega’s ambitions. Yasuhara, Ohshima and Naka sometimes worked up to 19 hours a day to produce the game of their dreams, with Naka estimating that the design of Green Hill Zone, the first world of the game, took a total of 8 months to perfectly match the initial project. This with one idea in mind: to design “the fastest video game in history”, a bet held not without encountering a real difficulty, that of making the levels interesting to explore despite the phenomenal speed of a character that we don’t particularly want to make walk like, at by chance, a Mario. Simple, effective, ultra lively, and above all revealing a powerful 16-bit console embodying the future, the first game in the Sonic license experienced unprecedented enthusiasm for Sega upon its release. It is unanimously praised in the specialist press and among players around the world, selling 15 million units (not far from the rival’s 20 Super Mario Worldreleased in November 1990).
SEGA’s streamlined star
Unfortunately, although Sonic’s popular success was very significant during the Mega Drive era, it was somewhat short-lived. The company’s second best-selling game only reached half of the historical total, and guess what: it’s its sequel, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (1992), which notably introduces a two-player mode absent from the first part, and which strangely was not missing. As for the third part (1994), which followed shortly in Sega’s historic hit parade, it was especially known for the presence, always subject to debate, of Michael Jackson in the composition of its soundtrack, testifying to a license with a phenomenal aura for a few years. Unfortunately, if Sonic 2 et 3 hold up the comparison quite well, the first part remains the most cult.
Certainly, Sega will try to repeat the feat of the tour de force achieved on Mega Drive with the excellent Sonic Adventure on Dreamcast, the first opus in 3D and probably the only one that could have considered the myth. But it is clear that the icon of the 1990s, who managed to destabilize Mario for a generation of machines, came up against a harsh reality, that of a design resolutely thought out for an era and a context. Where Mario was always thought of by Nintendo as a hero who was never fashionable, and in fact never went out of fashion either, Sega bet in the 16-bit era on too short-term a bet, still managing to design a mythical mascot but one who would then cross the decades of being sometimes mocked, and giving the feeling of constantly trying to rehabilitate its image, helped in this by an engaged fanbase and sales that are always there.
Better in cinema than on consoles
For more than 25 years, the franchise’s games have oscillated between average (or even mediocre) and very good, rarely reaching excellence, which happened in particular in 2017 when developers outside Sega and Sonic Team published Sonic Maniaa tribute to the original Mega Drive trilogy. A shame. No three-dimensional episode will come close to Sonic Adventureand the Mario Kart-like quite a few featuring the blue hedgehog and his friends will certainly create a somewhat illusion, achieving correct figures as each time while receiving honorable reviews. Well, and then sorry, but we are not going to ignore these disasters that were the sadly misnamed Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), first opus in high definition rarely reaching average in the press, and horrible Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric (2014), Wii U exclusive, considered the worst game in the license, and crowned with a catastrophic 32 on Metacritic.
However, despite numerous failures and inconsistent reviews from one game to another, and if no Sonic has ever been as exceptional or revolutionary as was Sonic the Hedgehog in 1991, the license was doing surprisingly well despite the famous “ Sonic cycle HAS”. In the 2020s, the blue hedgehog has quite simply become a movie star with already three feature films of rather good reputation (thanks Jim Carrey). This is ultimately where he competes best with Mario, a shame for these two mascots that nothing opposes on consoles, given their seven collaborations between 2008 and 2020 in the different episodes of the saga Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Gamesultimate witnesses to a battle ax buried for a long time.
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