How blessed we are to have Sonic the Hedgehog. Not for his games, mind you, which have ranged from awful to occasionally decent over the past three decades. For the culture. Sonic the Hedgehog, as a video game series, I would happily give up forever — but not at the cost of its enduring impact.
In broad, sweeping terms, I love everything about Sonic the Hedgehog: his character design (courtesy of Naoto Ohshima); his blue-sky worlds bursting with primary colors, checkerboard landscapes, and pinball parts; his reticence to show feet; and every piece of clumsy, earnest fan art that Sonic fans have composed in MS Paint. That includes every fetishized Sonic, Tails, and Amy atrocity lurking in the depths of DeviantArt.
But Sonic the Hedgehog’s games? With very few exceptions, I believe we’d be better off without them.
I didn’t always think this way. I was a Sonic fan from the very beginning. I may have even committed some light thievery to get my hands on the original Sonic the Hedgehog for Sega Genesis. As a desperate and unscrupulous young teen completely fascinated by Sonic, I “borrowed” my mom’s credit card to acquire a........