Lookin’ Back #21 – Sonic The Hedgehog

Have you forgotten how good Sonic used to be?

Well, I wouldn’t blame you.  Most of the 3D Sonic games have been absolutely awful.  But with Project Needlemouse underway, let’s remember the game that started the whole Sonic series, the original Sonic the Hedgehog.

The original game was the first game created by Sonic Team in Sega’s quest to get a mascot for their systems, as Mario was the main mascot for Nintendo.  For those of you who don’t know, and I welcome you back from that rock you just crawled out from, Sonic The Hedgehog was a platform game released back in 1991 for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis and Master System.  However, rather than the Master System version being an 8-bit port of the Mega Drive version, it was actually built from the ground up.

The aim of the game was simple.  There are 6 worlds in the game with 3 stages, known as acts.  You had to get from one end of the level to the other, collecting rings and defeating the enemy robots to release the animals that had been imprisoned in them by the evil Dr Robotnik.  (Back before Sega sadly decided to change his western name to his Japanese name of Dr Eggman).

Along the way, if you collected enough rings in a level, you could access a special stage in order to try and find and collect a Chaos Emerald.  These stages consisted of a rotating maze with various blocks you could hit which changed the speed at which the maze rotates or changed the direction of the rotations.  The Master System version didn’t actually have the Special Stages.  Instead, the Chaos Emeralds were just hidden around the levels and you had to find them.

One of the biggest features to note about the old 2D Sonic games was the speed.  The PAL version of Sonic The Hedgehog ran at a slightly slower speed than the NTSC version, although it was still very fast.  It was possible to traverse some of the earlier levels in less than 30 seconds if you wanted to.

The worlds in the game were very varied and looked great and were well designed.  You had the lush greenery of the Green Hill Zone, to the factory stylings of the Scrap Brain Zone, and the underwater Labyrinth Zone, where speed was essential in order to get between the oxygen bubbles and prevent Sonic from drowning.  The soundtrack was as varied as the levels as well, and all the music fitted in very nicely to the levels.

The Master System version was completely different to the Mega Drive version.  The two versions did share some zone names, but the levels were different.   The Master System version also had it’s own zones, such as the Bridge Zone, which was a side scrolling zone filled with collapsing bridges, and was a very tough zone to crack.

The boss battles with Robotnik were great as well, from the giant swinging ball at the end of the Green Hill Zone, through avoiding the electric shots and avoiding getting crushed in Final Zone.  Sure, Sonic may have been incredibly short in comparison to Super Mario World, but it is still, in my mind, one of the finest platformers ever produced, and if you have never played it, you really should give it a blast.  You’ll have fun charging everywhere and bashing robots to bits.

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