PixlBit

30 years ago today, Sega's blue blur made his debut.

By 1990, Sega was enjoying newfound success with their new 16-bit Genesis system. It quickly became a competent competitor to the NES with popular titles like Golden Axe, Phantasy Star II, and Revenge of Shinobi. But despite the rising success of the Genesis, the platform didn’t have a brand character that could rival Super Mario. Tasked with creating such a mascot, character designer Naoto Oshima came up with Sonic- a blue anthropomorphic hedgehog. Sonic the Hedgehog was released on June 23, 1991- two full months ahead of the Super Nintendo’s debut in America. It was a big summer for Sega, and today marks the 30th anniversary of the moment that made them an icon in the home console gaming space.

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There never was any magic, was there?

There is nary a soul out there who hasn’t seen or heard of Snoopy- that lovable beagle in the Peanuts comic dating back to the 1950s. Having existed across various forms of media, it was only a matter of time before Snoopy and friends would end up on a Nintendo system or two. Such was the case in 1990 when Kemco released Snoopy’s Magic Show on the Game Boy. A few years later, one of my sister’s school friends let my brother borrow this game, which I eventually played and completed. Returning to this game as an adult, I have no idea how kid me finished it without a broken spirit.

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You can’t beat this meat.

Ten years ago, we were given a gift in the form of Super Meat Boy on Xbox Live Arcade. At the time, we’d never really seen anything like it. Smaller indie downloadable games were really just starting to enter the mainstream consciousness of gaming and Super Meat Boy effectively kicked the door in and made clear that these smaller titles had something special to offer and were here to stay. And since that statement, myriad other developers have taken lessons from Super Meat Boy and its DNA can be seen in so many games that would follow. However, this creates an interesting predicament that Team Meat needed to solve - how do you offer a sequel that manages to bring something new to the table, while still feeling as simple and approachable (and difficult) as the original did?

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I can't track these changes.

It almost hurts to write that it’s been 13 years since Sega released Banana Blitz back on the Wii. At the time, I know I couldn’t have been more excited that we were about to see a Monkey Ball game that leveraged the motion capabilities of Nintendo’s hit system. However, when it finally released, I wasn’t thrilled with the results. Rather than leveraging the Wii remote in its horizontal orientation, like many other motion-centric games had, it forced you to point forward and contort your arm in awkward ways to tilt the stage. I quickly shelved the game and wrote it off as a failure. I suspect I wasn’t the only one, because after all these years Sega has released an HD remaster of the game leveraging more standard console controls using the analog stick. Unfortunately, the transition has introduced level design changes that bring things to a degree of difficulty that I’ve found to be insurmountable.

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