The Cruel March of Time: Sonic The Hedgehog

Sonic the Hedgehog is my first memory of playing a video game. My parents got me a Mega Drive system from the local Cash Converters and set it up with a CRT TV on top of an old, broken down washing machine repurposed for use as a table. I was drawn in by the colours and the fast gameplay, and of course, the ‘cool’ hedgehog running around those bright levels. In just a few months’ time I had become a fan, and had amassed a collection of STCs (Sonic The Comic), and tapes of the Adventures of Sonic The Hedgehog show.

A hit of pure colour and nostalgia
(image from http://www.soniczone0.com/games/sonic1/greenhill/)

At his core, Sonic was the embodiment of 90’s culture and the cheese associated with it. Everything in the 90’s was ‘X-Treme to the max!’, and most products were sold by young teens wearing sunglasses and skateboarding, while also shouting ‘whoa!’ in their best Bill and Ted accents. That is why he has aged so badly.

Cool is a term that is always changing. What is trendy right now won’t be trendy with the passing of time. With the rise of the Internet and the faster-paced social culture we now in, memes can be created and destroyed in a matter of hours. We now live in an era of ‘viral’ culture.

Which is why to base a character purely on ‘coolness’, like Sonic, is ultimately dooming him to a life of cringe.

Look at any memes on Sonic the Hedgehog and you will see what I mean. He is the butt of most internet jokes. Every critic loves to loathe him, and every Internet persona loves to mock him. Sonic is not just uncool, he is the unfortunate victim of a pile-on at the hands of the whole Internet. 

I’m not trying to say that the position is undeserved; after a spate of low-quality titles and cringy attempts to redefine the character, ultimately coming to a head with Sonic 2006 and now the much-reviled Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric, that blue hedgehog is just about the most mocked character that one can think of.

As a fan from being a child, and someone who managed to cope with years of bullying thanks to the blue bomber (and yes, someone who even made DeviantArt recolours, I was one of those people), it makes me sad to see the public image that has befallen Sonic. While many do appreciate him as a mascot, most agree that he was a product of his time.

The problem with all of this is that Sonic’s bottom line was ‘coolness’. He was meant to be the next big thing that made the last big thing look lame. He was designed to be inherently ‘faddy’. That I called him the quintessential symbol of the 90s is testament to that fact. He had adopted just about everything that was a trend in those times, including sunglasses, guitars, a Macy’s Day Parade balloon, and an awkward stint as a DJ in a Dreamcast promotional video. 

Roll on the 2000’s; the popularity of the PS2, and the Xbox 360 generation after that. Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto and the modern FPS, and a new focus on ‘gritty action titles’ became the flavour of the day. There was no room for a Way-Past-Cool Blue Hedgehog; that was kiddy stuff. Even the big N itself suffered a little at the hands of the Gritty Times; look at the poor reception of the Gamecube, and the trouble it is having even to this day with its image of being ‘childish’. Thanks to the Nintendo Wii targeting a different audience, and 2010’s hipster-retro trend, Nintendo properties have survived, however, relatively unscathed. On the other hand, SEGA treated the world to Shadow the Hedgehog, in a desperate attempt to stay cool in this ‘gritty’ era.

The issue is that Sonic was never made to last. Mario was never meant to be everything ‘trendy’ about a particular era. He was always just himself; a colourful, impactful mascot. He never had to do anything cool to be popular, because Nintendo relied on a different bottom line than SEGA did when they designed Sonic the Hedgehog.

While there has been a recent uptick in the quality of titles released in the Sonic name, such as Colours and Generations, Sonic the Hedgehog has never, and will never, become quite as significant or as ‘cool’ in the public consciousness as he once was. Thankfully, his original Mega Drive games are good enough to stand the test of time; it is only a shame that as a mascot, Sonic hasn’t stood that same test.

But in another way, maybe Sonic the Hedgehog has stood that test. Maybe he is not meant to be cool today, but rather, an ironic look back at the things we did in the 90s that made us cringe. Maybe instead of trying to keep up with the times, what Sonic needs to do is own his cheese. Most of what the Internet now sees in Sonic they are using to mock 90s culture and laugh at it, and maybe that is a way forward for SEGA’s mascot. With Sonic Mania coming out, I feel confident that the developers are ‘getting it’, and understanding that Sonic is a product of his time, and using that ‘time’ to sell, rather than the mascot himself. By aiming for our nostalgia, Sonic has been kept somewhat alive, but lacking of an identity as eponymous as Mario’s, he has not thrived in the same way from that nostalgia. But maybe if his developers look hard enough and achieve the right balance of mocking 90s culture while at the same time embodying it, perhaps there is a way to take such mocking memes as Sanik and ‘Gotta go fast’ into something popular.

I have mentioned before that the march of time is always cruel, and Sonic perhaps more than most has suffered from that. I think that he was doomed from the start, because being a blue talking hedgehog that spoke in cliché slogans was never going to be edgy for long. As gaming has matured and its audience, perhaps in an immature way, called for gritty ‘realistic’ games, the Sonic franchise has stumbled and struggled to find its identity. However, recent iterations like Colours and Generations show some magic and life in the hedgehog yet, and I believe that now the marketing around Sonic may just be able to find that right balance of 90s mockery and nostalgia to inject a new life into the mascot that he may be able to set himself above his current, meme-fuelled disdain.

The Zelda Cycle and Popularity Backlash

Looking up a few more things about Breath of the Wild, I noted significant backlash from a few camps, those rare people that believe the game is complete trash. Murphy’s Law applies here, of course, that some people are just satirising the games community, but I also believe that many of Breath of the Wild’s detractors are serious in their disdain for a game that I believe is hard to hate.

It’s pretty interesting to watch the backlash from some of these people regarding Breath of the Wild and, while some can dispute the occurrence, ‘Metabombing’ has occasionally occurred, as with any other game, where a vocal minority of people are hitting the game’s Metacritic page with zero-reviews, as if changing an arbitrary number on a flawed site is going to make their lives qualitatively better somehow. This is an unusual occurrence, but it is one that I believe has reasoning behind it, that I like to call popularity backlash.

Taking a step back, however, people have also wrapped this up in something called ‘The Zelda Cycle’; the idea that says a Zelda game is reviewed with critical acclaim at its launch, only to be viewed with disdain in hindsight. Hindsight, of course, is 20/20, and many have decried Skyward Sword as one of the worst Zelda games ever made, which seems strange given its almost universal love from critics that it received at the time.

I think some may take the backlash and occasional Metabomb as an aspect of the Zelda Cycle, that now that some time has passed, people are looking back at Breath of the Wild with a more critical eye, but I don’t believe this is the case, nor do I believe that the Zelda Cycle exists in the way that most view it.

Instead, I think that the Zelda Cycle is more to do with the aforementioned popularity backlash. To use a painful example, look at Frozen; the movie was viewed with love by most when it first came out, but over time, that almost universal praise turned to scorn and even backlash. Over the repeated ‘Let It Go’ references, memes and rehashes, people just got annoyed at the thing that was popular. A significant backlash occurred and now, Frozen is the butt of many jokes that are aimed toward such elements. A similar thing occurred with Minions from Despicable Me; those little yellow shits once thought of as harmless slapstick elements in a relatively harmless film, thanks to over-marketing have now become this toxic gimmick viewed with scorn.

Now, I am not suggesting that Zelda is anywhere near the level of Minions, but what I am suggesting is that near-universal praise and popularity can in some cases be a massive turn off for people in its own right. Thanks to hipsters and the ‘I liked it before it was cool’ mentality, or the ‘I never liked that new popular thing, look how cultured I am’ trend, I think that universal acclaim for any property makes it suddenly the cool thing to hate, as an anti-culture trend. People think it’s cool to stand out from the crowd, just because, and dislike arbitrary things as a result of this strange phenomenon.

I do think there are parts of Breath of the Wild that I didn’t see before that make the game less enjoyable in my view, especially rain, those creepy fairy animations that occur once you start upgrading high level gear, or a dubious Gerudo section that so far is giving me nothing to enjoy, but I do believe that at its core, Breath of the Wild is a good game. Building further on that point, I believe that most Zelda titles are good games.

I think we have to take a step back and look at what older, now-disliked Zelda titles really are; they are more highly polished than most games, offer a reasonable challenge and are well-designed at their core, so I don’t think that any could be considered truly bad, not even Skyward Sword for all of its disdain; it’s just that critics were looking at the technical quality of the game, not the use of the tropes within the game that departed from the Zelda formula. Certain Zelda games may not have felt particularly Zelda-like, but they were undeniably well-made experiences.

I think we need to take a step back when we’re viewing popular items with such disdain, and try to look at what we are actually trying to say. Of course, in the case of Minions, popularity backlash was ultimately accurate in the way that the final disdain for the film was perfectly justified and the marketing was so cynical that many were left feeling disgusted, but Breath of the Wild is a different creature. It is, at its core, an enjoyable experience that admirably tried to capture classic Zelda tropes, while at the same time iterating and improving upon open-world design. Whether or not the game is deserving of the total acclaim that it has received is up for debate, but I do believe that at its core, like many before it, Breath of the Wild is a good game.