If you were a young child in the ‘90s, as I was ( NINETIES KIDS WHERE YOU AT?), Sonic might have been the personality that you modeled yourself on. Where Mario was unflinchingly nice and positive, Sonic called it like he saw it. To cast it in more recent terms, Sonic was snark Mario was smarm. This idea is still central to how we use the web and interact online today. He had captured Kurt Cobain’s “whatever” attitude, Michael Jordan’s graceful arrogance, and Bill Clinton’s get-it-done demeanor. Sonic embodied not only the spirit of Sega of America’s employees but also the cultural zeitgeist of the early nineties. Sonic’s imposing look and personality were eventually scaled back, but Sega still had high hopes for his quote-unquote “mature” attitude.Īgain, Harris explains: Sonic wouldn’t just become the face of the company but also would represent their spirit: the tiny underdog moved with manic speed, and no matter what obstacles stood in his way, he never ever stopped going. What Sega ended up with was Sonic, a character that in its initial construction “looked villainous and crude, complete with sharp fangs, a spiked collar, an electric guitar, and a human girlfriend whose cleavage made Barbie’s chest look flat.” Toward that end, Kalinske proposed to increase Sega’s advertising budget and create edgy advertisements that mocked Nintendo and appealed to teens and college students rather than younger kids. Doing so would not only speak to older generations but present video games as a mainstream form of entertainment, no different from books, movies, and music. Sega, hoping to distance itself from its rival, baked this sort of gritty personality into the core of the Sonic character.Īs Blake Harris recalled in his book on the rivalry, Console Wars: Sega needed to redefine itself as hip, cool, and in-your-face. While Mario, iconic as he is, is a simple plumber with few personality traits other than a peppy demeanor and a bushy mustache, early Sonic is probably best-defined as “Gen-X edgy.” This is not unintentional. In the early- and mid-’90s, Sonic was one of the most recognizable pop-culture staples in the world. That meant that at the very beginning of the Web, Sega was in the midst of a protracted battle against Nintendo for domination of the video-game market and heavily pitching what would become one of the most popular franchises of all time. The Sonic franchise first appeared on the Sega Genesis video-game console in 1991, two years before the World Wide Web even existed. On a base level, Sonic’s popularity is a result of being in the right place at the right time. To understand Sonic in the context of the web, you need to analyze the character himself. Sonic is the web’s id at work, a fascinating emulsion of nostalgia, scorn, schadenfreude, and hope. Sonic is everywhere you look on the internet, genuine beloved by some fans, ironically praised by others, and often a mix of the two. I am, of course, talking about Sonic the Hedgehog, who turns 25 years old today. In a rapidly accelerating society, it is fitting that one of the internet’s original pillars is a creature dedicated to speed and ferocity, unceasing momentum as we push toward an uncertain future. Interests shift.īut one thing will remain on the internet eternally, from now until the end of time, when the sea swallows us whole and drags us into the murky dark. Memes rise and fall at an ever-increasing speed. The global hive mind goes through collective stages and waves. At the same time, events, ideas, people are forgotten immediately. Every blog post, every status update, every photo upload is logged somewhere.
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