Sunday, January 23, 2011

After Two Decades, Finally We Can All Play Sonic Games Online

By Simon Smith


Have you ever noticed that more fun something appears to be, the more likely it is to land on a list some expert compiles of things that are harmful? We must have a societal threshold for enjoyment that can not be exceeded, and when we get close, the excitement within the grumpy crowd increases. That may apply to all entertainment venues, but sonic games online is beyond their grasp.

When compared with voluminous number of games that demonstrate the violence of warfare, street violence and other depraved themes, here would seem no contest. Yet even with the innocent world Sega has created with an extremely fast hedgehog and his arch nemesis Doctor Robotnik there are naysayers. Just try to sit down at the console and enter the exciting world of Sonic and you discover there is a seemingly unending number of chores.

This is the 20th year since the game debuted. The creators at Sega were responding to their CEO who made it clear Sega needed some kind of mascot. The prime competition at the time was Mario of Super Mario fame, who was just lighting up the fan base. What came next was an internal contest at Sega to try and find the character that would be the face of Sega.

The Sega CEO decided to hold a competition amongst his employees to develop a character that would provide a mascot to the company. In the end, with a number of interesting characters in the competition, the final two competitors were an armadillo and a hedgehog. The blue hedgehog was selected, though how he would appear in his final form turned out to be a work in progress. The problem was that each audience needed a different representation of the character.

One hurdle creative gaming programmers and creators must contend with is that the games are immensely popular and if a particular character and game is to survive, it needs to appeal to a world wide audience. The real challenge is that the worldwide audience is anything but homogeneous. A particular problem arose for Sonic as he headed to the United States for his North American debut.

This presented something of a problem for the marketing team handling North America, they knew it needed to be changed, but they were not making much headway convincing the Japanese team, so they flew to Japan. Eventually the Japanese team allowed that the American Marketers may know what is best, so they relented. It was one of their best decisions, as the American audience turned out to be one of the strongest.

The hedgehog was made to be fast and even his name explains that speed, as he is capable of moving faster than the speed of sound. His power sneakers are critical to his abilities of course, and help him on his varying attack modes that help him capture the seven chaos emeralds. Keeping Doctor Robotink from getting control of the emeralds is a critical mission Sonic must achieve.

The hedgehog has done very well competing with the plumber for Super Mario fame, and the have been competing head to head for more than a decade. The exception was the introduction to three dimensional gaming, an arena Nintendo was much better suited for than Sega. There is still hope however, because now that everyone can play sonic games online, the differences in the gaming platforms is narrowing once again.




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