There is a new Sonic game that came out this summer. This is the original ad I guess.
So the new game is called Sonic Mania and it is basically the continuity of a game that came out in 1991.
To this day, I’m not sure you can do a better first game than Sonic the Hedgehog did. It destroyed me when I saw it. I was going to the store to buy a game for my birthday. A platform game for PC that looked gorgeous and fun and that I had been eying for months! Sonic was running on the Sega Genesis on the demo stand.
It blew my fucking mind, took the ashes off the ground and blew them in my face again.
The speed, the colors, the shapes, the sounds –that ring sound y’all, think about how perfect it is- it was so insanely better than anything I had seen and heard in my life. I didn’t even care about the game I wanted anymore, nothing meant anything in front of that little TV, watching beautiful scrollings and animations. Sega was in another league at that time.
Now, 2017. I really don’t care about Sonic anymore. Not by disrespect or anti-nostalgia, it’s just that the gameplay, the concept, the music are part of the past. A pillar of game design and one of the best aesthetic produced in the 90s. But it’s still just a platform game where you go fast and sometimes stop to jump on some trigger. I don’t know.
26 years later, almost 3 decades is a very, very long time with computer culture. Imagine if people demanded the original Mario Kart in mode 7 to be re-done because that’s the real Mario Kart. That would be weird. If Sonic Mania had come out in 2004 when Steam came out or 1999 to finish the decade with the most famous hedgehog, that would be different and make a lot more sense.
For me nothing can beat the first time I saw the original. Ecstatically traumatized by a blue animal.