It’s 2022, an eye-watering 31 years since I first encountered the little blue bastard. I’m in the midst of a noisy trade show, and the latest Sonic the Hedgehog game is telling me how to open a switch gate, in a tutorial level that looks worryingly like Death Stranding – a post-apocalyptic Kojima game about delivering Amazon packages to Geoff Keighley, or something. Is this what 31 years as a sexless mascot does to a mf?
Thirty-one years.
Yet, somehow, Sonic has prevailed. Against the insurmountable odds of multiple decades passing, the console arm of SEGA that he originated as a mascot of disappearing in a puff of bad management, and (perhaps most astoundingly) a general sense that the games have been a bit bobbins since, well, 1998 if you’re being charitable or 1994 if you aren’t.