SONIC THE HEDGEHOG (Sega, 1991)

Jorges Luiz Borges, a writer and essayist, once characterized great art as “Fire, plus Algebra.”  That is to say, pure energy and science, in roughly equal measures.  And history has proven this simple, resonant (and rather evasive) concept time and again, in the great works of literature, theatre, film and music.  As the world changes, along with the parameters of what we’re willing to understand and acknowledge as ‘art’, it’s even shown up in the occasional computer game too.

Now it’s murky water, the whole ‘video games as art’ thing, and there’s many who’d baulk at the very idea, but I’d say that if you’re willing to broadly define ‘art’ as something that makes an innovative, creative, emotional impression on you, then it’d be justified.

So what if it that art’s prefaced with a tinny voice shrilling “Saaaaaay-gaaaaaaa”?  Nothing’s perfect.  Alexander of Anchrios didn’t even finish the Venus De Milo’s arms, for God’s sake.

Then, as now, the cultural and technological footprint of Sonic the Hedgehog is almost incalculable.  You’d struggle to meet someone in Britain, America or Japan between the ages of 25 and 35 that hasn’t played the game, or at least wasn’t aware of it.  Talk Sonic to people – anybody – and you’ll find yourself mining a limitless stock of fond memories, and nostalgic good-will.

The introduction of the Sonic character was the Empire Strikes Back moment of the 16-bit war.  That point when the momentum swung over to the Dark Side: the sleek, black Megadrive, with its languid curves, and its saucy adverts, devouring daylight in bedrooms across the world.  Let the SNES kids have their ‘family fun’: let them have their musical composition packages, their remedial painting programs, their wheat farming simulators.  Hell, let ‘em have their Mario.  Because Mario couldn’t do this.

And really, it’s Mario who was the counterpoint to everything Sonic did, and was...  because like all great rivalries, you have to understand one alongside the other.  Until this point, Sega’s most compelling and identifiable mascot was Alex Kidd: that was like going into battle with an overcooked piece of broccoli.  A very obvious two fingers to Nintendo, Sonic was created to be everything Mario – and the Mario games - weren’t.  A marketing masterclass, he took a front seat in the vanguard of Sega’s ascendancy, and from that point on - for the duration of the 16-bit era - they never looked back (despite what your Nintendo owning mates might have told you at the time).  Sega understood that in playgrounds around the world, there were kids getting a verbal shoeing off of Mario 3 owners – this was their antidote.

To set the scene – my first ever Sonic (and Megadrive) experience was at my friend David’s house, one of those wealthy kids that effortlessly seemed to amass cool stuff.  I had a couple of Ghostbusters figures, for example; David had Ecto-1.  I had Battle-Armour Skeletor; he had Snake Mountain.  And now his Megadrive was the new thing.  As a C64 owner, I’d played on a couple of my friends’ Amigas prior to this, probably an Atari ST too, and I’d grudgingly come to understand that yes, there were systems out there that were giving a bit more ooomph.  Yes, there were systems that loaded a little quicker, that looked better, that had the kind of luxuriant, textured gloss you only got with Amiga games.  But playing Sonic for the first time – and I remember this, vividly – just flung everything else into total, instant obsolescence.  From the point my dad arrived to take me home, owning that game was a matter of almost biblical significance.  And I’m sure that as I was yammering on, as we sliced through a wet Saturday night and back towards home, he was mentally ushering my incontinent sheepdog of a C64 off towards the metaphorical barn.

It’s hard to explain just how profound a departure from the norm(s) Sonic the Hedgehog was.  Playing it for the first time was a bit like emerging into Oz: it just cast everything that’d come before into instantaneous shades of sepia.  It was explosively colourful, an orgasm of Technicolour, just garishly thrilling from start to finish.  A turbo-charged, weird, abstract fantasyland... it was like nothing I’d seen before.  It lasered itself into my brain and it thumped insistently away there until I’d blagged myself a Megadrive for my 11^th birthday.

You’ve got to understand Sonic in the context of its time: nowadays, of course, all games look unanimously stunning, there’s no expense spared, but back then – when the industry was churning out what seemed like fifty titles a week, of wildly varying quality - games frequently could (and did) look horrendous.  There were a lot of transparent rush-jobs, particularly when it came to movie tie-ins, and ropey arcade conversions.  Sonic quickly started shifting the Megadrive on its own, because it showed what it could do, what was so different and special about it.  The first taste is with the eye, after all: Matt Groening once said that the reason he’d used such a gonzo colour scheme in The Simpsons was that he wanted something to grab the viewer’s attention when they were channel-surfing.  Sonic works on the same premise – before you’ve experienced the speed of the game, the ingenious level designs, or the sheer variety of its environments, it had ensnared your  complete fascination and commitment.  As a player, yes; but also as a kid.

I concentrated ferociously on Sonic over the following weeks.  I became almost intimately familiar with it, because – like all great games – there were so many ways to complete it.  No save points – you played it from the start, again and again and again.  Racing through the chequered brown hills and lime green grass of Spring Hill, doing the loop-de-loops, hitting the red springpads and rocketing off into the skies... well, it knocked the arse off of BC’s Quest for Tyres, put it that way.  You could hurtle through the levels, or you could take your time and explore; you could indulge your collector’s instinct, and hunt down every gold ring, every bonus, every power-up and extra life, or you could just as easily go javelining off towards the boss battles (and the games magazines of the time were all replete with ‘fastest completion’ records – pretty much every one of them seemed to employ some score-busting, acne-addled spiv, glowering out from the pages with folded arms and a fixed jaw, and calling himself something daft like ‘the Terminator’).

Up until this point, platform games were generally left to right affairs, with an occasionally risqué dash of ‘up’, or perhaps even some fruity ‘down’s.  Because of this, the real joy of Sonic was in going for a wander – once you’d acclimatized to the bedazzling sunburst world, there was almost always a wall that could be smashed through, a ledge you’d never noticed, a swarm of rings hovering just out of reach and implying that yes, there was still something you’d not found.  It rewarded your curiosity: Sonic always seemed to have that extra cranny or crevice to uncover (the only comparable experience was Turrican, although that was a much less leisurely experience – you could go anywhere in that game too, but wherever you did go, you were invariably getting the shit kicked out of you at the time). 

It truly was a fantastic game, and one that words don’t quite do justice to.  I will always remember it fondly; as something magnificently new, as the centrepoint of many a playground bust-up (I regularly defended that little blue hedgehog as I would have a member of my own family), and as the guardian of some especially warm and fuzzy memories.  Was it a complicated game?  No.  Was it particularly deep, or difficult?  Not really.  It was just tasty looks and lurid speed, allied to a scientifically honed concept of top draw platforming.  It was fire and algebra.

It takes guts to embrace simplicity and allow it to speak for itself.  Summing up Sonic, I’m reminded of a quote by a producer, who worked for many years with AC/DC, and claimed once that “it’s the hardest thing in the world to make a proper AC/DC record.”  And not because the music’s too simple, and there’s nothing to it – because it’s so sincerely simple and confident that the temptation is to tart it up a bit, to take a few steps outside of the premise, which in turn is naturally going to throw everything out of whack.  Pretty much every sequel after Sonic 2 fell prey to this idea, leant a little too heavily on the algebra side, and sacrificed bucketloads of accessibility – the thing that made Sonic so damn good – in the process.  Eventually they shoe-horned him into the world of 3D, and it was, predictably, a shambles.  But the first two Sonic games – and this one in particular - are testament to that perfect storm of game-changing confidence, innovation and science, when someone, somewhere, just gets it right.

41 million Megadrive owners can’t be wrong, after all.