Sonic the Hedgehog was the first video game character featured as a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. In 1993, arguably at the height of the Sega mascot’s popularity, the Sonic balloon soared above New York City until it neared Columbus Circle at the Southwest corner of Central Park. There it struck a light pole. The balloon ruptured and deflated, causing minor injuries to a child and an off-duty police officer standing below. The next year, the balloon reappeared, repaired and ready to fly once more. It successfully completed the parade’s route and Katie Couric noted on NBC’s live coverage of the event that she and co-host Willard Scott were happy to see Sonic doing well after running into some turbulence the year prior. In 1995, the year Sega released its Sega Saturn console in North America, the balloon struck another light pole. Then in 1997, the balloon hit a third light pole and deflated once again. The parade retired the balloon, keeping it out of the event in 1998, the year Sega discontinued the Saturn. Then in 2011, a new Sonic balloon lofted above New York’s streets in celebration of the character’s 20th anniversary. The balloon flew for two years, before getting caught in the branches of a tree in 2013, needing to be cut free. Sonic the Hedgehog has stood as an institution for Sega for more than two decades, a cultural icon with mass marketing abilities. He has appeared in dozens of games, numerous action figures and hundreds of comics. He’s had five television series and even his own tubes of toothpaste and cans of spaghetti. To date, the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise has collectively sold over 140 million copies, with some games regarded as some of the best of all time and others some of the worst. And he has changed — a lot. From his first introduction to the Sega Genesis, to his leap to the third dimension in Sonic Adventure, to a shift toward character-driven, team-based action, and his recent evolution for the Sonic Boom series, Sonic has changed constantly over the past two decades. He’s also gained a lot of friends, who many argue don’t always seem to fit comfortably in his games, as depicted in the header image at the top of this story. After a tumultuous 20 years, Sonic isn’t the critical darling he once was. So Polygon set out to look at why and what the character’s future may hold. We spoke to a number of people who have had their hands on the series in an effort to pinpoint its largest evolutions, where it may have lost its footing, how Sega hopes to bring its flagship character back to the critical spotlight and the steps it’s taking to do so. Much like Sega’s balloons, it seems to be hard to keep Sonic up or down for too long.



Al Nilsen’s favorite character Approaching the 1988 release of the Sega Genesis, many people at Sega felt it was time to start over. Sega’s first mascot, Alex Kidd, first featured in the 1987 platformer Alex Kidd in Miracle World on the Sega Master System, did not become the cultural mainstay it needed to combat the juggernaut plumber at Nintendo. So, looking for a new mascot, Sega of Japan held an internal competition, allowing its employees to submit ideas for character designs. Designer and artist Naoto Ohshima came up with an idea of a blue hedgehog named "Sonic" that had fangs and a human girlfriend named Madonna and that fronted a rock band with a monkey on bass and an alligator on keyboard. Paired with a new gameplay prototype created by programmer Yuji Naka, the game put an emphasis on speed, something largely unseen at the time. When employees at Sega of America, such as CEO Tom Kalinske, Marketing Director Al Nilsen and Product Manager Madeline Schroeder, saw this prototype, they felt it had the potential to be a revolutionary game. But some at the branch weren't sure that Sonic was the right fit as the company’s mascot in his current state. Many at Sega wanted a mascot with worldwide appeal, accessible to any gender at any age. Some at Sega of America felt that Ohshima’s hedgehog was too aggressive, too mean. They weren't sure he had that universal appeal. So Sonic’s fangs came out and he got a cleaner, more inviting look. He lost the girlfriend and left the band, as well. "Sonic was alive and breathing, and Sonic was our friend." While Sega of Japan worked to develop what would become the first Sonic the Hedgehog, Sega of America set to figure out how to market the title to North American players. Al Nilsen worked at Sega of America from 1989 to 1993. He sold the first Sonic the Hedgehog to players by coordinating mall tours and press events that allowed attendees to play the game alongside a new Mario title, then vote on which they thought was the superior platformer. He also helped plan the world’s first global game launch for Sonic the Hedgehog 2 with the "Sonic 2sday" campaign. "I think [Sonic’s] legacy of great gameplay and great graphics and a very cool character," says Nilsen, who then repeats himself with more inflection, "a very cool character, was the legacy that had been established by myself and the rest of the Sega team. And what’s interesting is I think that legacy still exists to this day." It’s a legacy Nilsen calls "classic Sonic," and it’s a legacy he believes has been tarnished. Nilsen speaks of the character with fanaticism. He posts about Sonic constantly on his personal Twitter account and appears on numerous Sega and Sonic-centric podcasts. Sonic is arguably one of the biggest contributors to Nilsen’s 20-plus years in marketing, and when he talks about the character, he romanticizes the early games and franchise, all the while sounding heartbroken over its current defamation in the critical spotlight. "Sonic was alive and breathing," Nilsen says, "and Sonic was our friend." At his peak, Sega executives saw Sonic as more popular than Mickey Mouse. Nilsen left Sega during the development of Sonic the Hedgehog 3. He kept up with the franchise, though, often seeing upcoming games at industry events. He likens the character now to an actor appearing in a B, C or D grade film. "When [former employees of Sega of America] would go to E3 and see what was happening ... a lot of times we would just go and we would shake our heads," he says. "And we were very, very sad. Because, you know, what we had established and what we had built was something that was very, very special." Sonic’s seen numerous revisions in appearance over the years. He’s received a more contemporary, edgy look in Sonic Adventure and a bolder, Western-focused redesign for the Boom series. He has bounced between 2-D and 3-D, console and mobile, and often receives different subtle designs in each game, such as a classic look in Sonic Generations and a modern look in games such as Sonic Heroes and Sonic Unleashed. "It’s fine to go and change the look of the character," Nilsen says, "but the gameplay has to go and play off against that." The original Sonic the Hedgehog married a new type of gameplay that put emphasis on speed with a focus on a unique character. Nilsen believes that recent games in the series haven’t been able to keep this relationship going. "Then the story started getting convoluted." he continues. "If I was Sonic, I was probably having an identity crisis." Nilsen thinks the series’ canon, or the "bible," as he refers to it, needs to be "tightened up." "You don’t need this cast of 8,000 characters," he says. To others, Sonic's drop off had less to do with the variety of characters and more to do with design issues. As Mario's games remained critical favorites, Sonic's received uneven reviews that often pointed out issues with the games' level designs and gameplay inconsistencies. Sonic was immensely popular in the early 1990s. In 1992, Nilsen claims that Sonic was more popular than Mickey Mouse, based on the characters’ respective "Q Score," or "Quotient Score," ratings — scores assigned by the company Marketing Evaluations, Inc. that track the "consumer appeal" of celebrities, brands, cartoon characters and video game characters. "We had, in two years, eclipsed Mickey!" he says. "So we were, you know, dismayed over what was going on." "Then the story started getting convoluted. If I was Sonic, I was probably having an identity crisis." Henry Schafer, executive vice president of Marketing Evaluations, says Sonic’s popularity over the past 20 years has remained fairly consistent, though he no longer has access to numbers from 1992. Schafer tells Polygon that, as of Spring 2015, Sonic had a Q Score of 20 and a 58% level of familiarity with people ages six and up. That means 20% of the population considers Sonic one of their favorite characters, and 58% of the population recognizes him. In 1996 — the earliest the company’s digitized data reaches back — Sonic had a Q Score of 17 and a 60% familiarity rating. Schafer also says that, as of Spring 2015, the character was most popular with males between the ages of six and eight years old, with a Q Score of 48 and a 71% familiarity rating — due in part to the popularity of Cartoon Network’s Sonic Boom television series. Mario is currently the most popular video game character for ages six and up, with a Q Score of 30 and a 73% familiarity rating, while Mickey Mouse currently has a Q Score of 35 and a familiarity rating of 86%. "I still think there’s a love and affection for Sonic," Nilsen says. "[Fans] may have abandoned the games, but they haven’t abandoned the character."



"They say the classics never go out of style" Following a surprise release in North America in March of 1995, the Genesis’ successor, the Sega Saturn, ultimately struggled to compete with its main competitor, Sony’s first PlayStation. Part of this struggle came from other platformers with strong mascots appearing on rival hardware, like Naughty Dog's Crash Bandicoot and Nintendo’s Super Mario 64. These games were largely unrivaled by Sonic, as many of the staff behind the Sonic original games had moved on to other projects. Sega found itself in a point of transition, and Sonic followed suit. The company experimented with different gameplay techniques, such as 1996’s isometric Sonic 3D Blast which gave Sonic a quasi 3-D space to explore, and the unreleased Sonic X-treme, which experimented with a different take on a 3-D Sonic game but ran into development trouble. As the franchise stalled, Sonic Team began work on the series’ first proper 3-D game, originally planned for the Saturn, and series’ co-creator Yuji Naka returned to the series after spending time developing other games. But, as Sega decided to leave the Saturn behind, development moved to the company’s next console, the Sega Dreamcast, where better architecture and more power could allow Sonic Team to make the biggest Sonic game yet. "We have pushed the Dreamcast as far as we can at present," Naka told Edge magazine in 1998 about the new game. In Sonic Adventure, Sega introduced Sonic to 3-D with an iconic opening scene where he’s chased by a whale. What came next was Sonic Adventure, released for the Dreamcast in North America on September 9, 1999. The game introduced players to a redesigned, edgier Sonic, whose attitude increased as the character was given a voice and three dimensions to explore within. Emphasis was put on the game’s visuals and large levels in an attempt to make the game the breadwinner Sega needed to re-enter the console market. "Sonic is a character who was born in a time when his [speed] and the game he was part of were intrinsically tied together, and neither could have existed without the other," says Sonic Team Character Designer Yuji Uekawa, who worked on many of the stylized character models in Sonic Adventure. When considering redesigns for the game, Uekawa says that Sega wanted to use the Dreamcast’s architecture to bring out the most in its characters. "On the artwork side," Uekawa says, "we added strength and weakness to the lines, giving him a more bold presence while still remaining cartoon-like, and we changed his posing to be more dynamic, emphasizing his movement when compared to the previous designs." Sonic Team made Sonic taller, added more facial expressions and colored his eyes green. Sonic Adventure marked the series’ first big push toward more story-driven games that put the personality of Sonic and other characters up front. The game featured six playable characters: Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Amy Rose, as well as the series’ newcomers, Big the Cat, a large anthropomorphic cat who loves fishing, and E-102 Gamma, a militarized robot. Each had their own respective storylines that intertwined and showed multiple perspectives on the same scenes. Each character had a theme song as well, emphasizing their personality and style. Sonic Adventure became the best-selling Sega Dreamcast game. Takashi Iizuka, the current head of Sonic Team and also the director on Sonic Adventure, says Sonic’s transition into 3-D has been the character’s "largest and most important" evolution over the years, and he notes the redesign and inclusion of a voice "let us show many more expressions for his character ... Part of this evolution of Sonic, we feel, has contributed to him surviving and remaining popular even after over 20 years." "The impetus for Sonic's redesign stemmed from a — perhaps misplaced — desire to continue to push Sonic as a AAA brand." Christian Whitehead, hired by Sega to remaster the first two Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis titles for mobile by rewriting the game’s source code using his "Retro Engine," believes that the character’s leap to 3-D had more of a detrimental effect on the series in the long run. "I think the evolution has come by necessity," Whitehead says, "starting with the obvious big change to 3-D, and then responding to various issues 3-D has presented in the subsequent titles." As the years go on, and more games come out, Whitehead feels this change has showed cracks in its foundation. "The impetus for Sonic's redesign stemmed from a — perhaps misplaced — desire to continue to push Sonic as a AAA brand," Whitehead continues. Sonic Adventure started a trend in the franchise of including multiple playable characters or teams, shifting the series’ focus towards different types of action rather than simply speed. "I felt [the other characters] were there more or less as padding and quickly overstayed their welcome when you were forced to play with them in games following the original Sonic Adventure," he says. Many Sonic games following Sonic Adventure imitated its gameplay and story style, setting a precedent for the series still around over a decade later.



Growing pains Following Sonic Adventure, Sonic games continued to expand on the trend of having multiple playable characters — with mixed results. Critics generally favored titles such as 2001’s Sonic Adventure 2 and its follow-up, 2003’s Sonic Heroes. Continuing with intertwining stories, the games introduced players to series’ newcomers like Shadow the Hedgehog and Rouge the Bat, as well as lesser known spin-off characters such as Charmy Bee and Espio the Chameleon, both introduced in the spin-off Knuckles’ Chaotix, released in 1995 for the Sega 32X. In the years following, Sonic Team and its famous franchise would experience bouts of turbulence. During the development of 2006’s Sonic the Hedgehog, given the same name as the series’ first release, series co-creator and the head of Sonic Team at the time, Yuji Naka, left Sega to form his own company, Prope, focusing on mobile gaming. He later said in a 2012 interview with Polygon that he left to avoid having to continue to make Sonic games, choosing to focus on new projects and IP instead. "Right now I can create a game without any limitations or dealing with any outside company," Naka said. 2006's Sonic the Hedgehog put players in control of Sonic, Shadow and the newly introduced Silver the Hedgehog, a telekinetic hedgehog that traveled 200 years back in time in an effort to kill Sonic. On top of three playable characters, the game periodically allowed players to control characters such as Tails, Amy, Knuckles and Rouge, amongst others, in order to reach areas the main characters couldn’t previously. In total, the game featured nine playable characters.

As Sonic’s 3-D adventures evolved, characters in many of the games seemed to be fighting for the spotlight.

The game released on November 14, 2006 as part of the franchise’s 15th anniversary. Littered with bugs, the game received almost unanimous negative reviews. The game’s follow-up, 2008’s Sonic Unleashed, didn’t fare much better, releasing to mixed and negative reviews from critics. Though Sonic was the only playable character, the game featured a "Werehog" mechanic that shifted the game’s focus to hand-to-hand combat when the character changed forms. Despite mixed reviews, the game sold over two million units. Sonic 2006 and Unleashed were the first Sonic games featured on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 — consoles that brought players an entirely new class of games that became staples of the industry in their own ways. In 2007, Assassin’s Creed, Portal, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, Mass Effect and BioShock all came to the market. As Sonic’s critical reception began to dwindle, these games laid cornerstones for what would become highly successful franchises, critically and commercially. [Update: This paragraph originally claimed Sonic Unleashed was the first game in the franchise on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, which was incorrect. We regret the error.] Following a critical low point for the franchise, mainline Sonic titles saw a return to a familiar formula. Games like Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1 and Episode 2, Sonic Colors, Sonic Generations and Sonic Lost World had a shift toward speed and (in some cases) side scrolling, as well as some featuring more "classic" designs of Sonic. Released between 2010 and 2013, these games were met with mixed to positive reviews from critics — a slight upswing for the series after two poorly-rated titles. And then after over 10 years of highs and lows, Sega announced a new take on the Sonic franchise.



Bob Rafei and the "ghosts of Sonic" In February of 2014, Sega announced a Sonic spin-off game, a tie-in with a television show announced in October of the prior year. The Wii U exclusive Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric was described by the company as a "fresh approach that will be at once both familiar and new" for Sonic. CEO and co-founder of developer Big Red Button, Bob Rafei, said in an interview before the game's release that it would be "a very different Sonic, both in tone and art direction." It returned to team-based gameplay with multiple playable characters. It also focused on action combat as well as exploration and saw a set of redesigns for Sonic — making him taller again, giving him blue arms and a bandana. Criticized by media and fans alike, the game had a public fall from grace, initially selling only a combined 490,000 copies with its sister game, Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal, developed by Sanzaru Games for the Nintendo 3DS — making it the one of the worst-selling Sonic games. "Unfortunately, the reception to [Rise of Lyric] was not as strong as we would have hoped," says Rafei in a new interview with Polygon — his first in over a year. "This industry really is punishing if you don’t have a product that performs well. We nearly closed the studio." "If you stay the same, I believe you stagnate, and that's a slow death." Prior to founding the company, Rafei spent 13 years working at Naughty Dog. Hired in 1995 as an art director to work on 1996’s original PlayStation exclusive, Crash Bandicoot, he stayed with the company up through the release of the developer’s 2007 PlayStation 3 debut, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. He explains it was "massive, iconic character-action games" like Sonic that helped spark his career. "Seeing Sonic break the fourth wall and sit there impatient as you're putting the controller down was a fascinating experience for me as a young artist," he says, referring to the idle screen animation in the first Sonic the Hedgehog where Sonic taps his foot in anticipation for players to begin playing again. Rafei says that this has been the "basic DNA" for the work he has done since. It is details like these that allow a player to see into the personality of a character, he says. Sonic Boom was to be the latest iteration in Sonic's evolution — a Sonic by Western designers, directed toward Western audiences. Rafei says Big Red Button liked the idea of what Sega wanted to do. "If you stay the same, I believe you stagnate, and that's a slow death," Rafei says. He calls Sega "brave" and explains that he admires its willingness to change and evolve its "grandfather character," something we may not see from a company like Nintendo, who has "stayed true to the Italian plumber formula." Many Sonic fans felt the redesigned characters in Sonic Boom took the character too far out of his comfort zone. Sonic was originally a showcase for how fast the Sega Genesis could process information, but according to Rafei there comes a point when it can all be too fast and the player’s mind can’t keep up. This is when Sega began exploring its flagship character’s personality, giving Sonic and other characters in the series their own unique stories. Taking influence from titles like Sonic Adventure and the games that followed, the Boom series followed suit, exploring Sonic and friends’ personalities as characters and focusing on character action. "The goal of the Sonic Boom brand was to make Sonic a bit more [well rounded] and to increase the other characters’ personalities," Rafei says. He explains Sega and Big Red Button came together as different entities to "really define what the Sonic brand was about" and to create a "consistent vision" for how the character would interact with a strong supporting cast. This is something he is proud of. Where a company like Disney may have a "corporate bible" for how to draw its characters, Sega has the combined vision of Sonic Team and Takashi Iizuka, both of which are instrumental in making sure every change made maintains both the Sonic brand and name. Rafei says that Sonic Team gave the developer "guardrails" to explore within as to what changes made sense visually, thematically and stylistically for its character. While not everything was necessarily set in stone, Rafei says "tremendous care" was taken by the two parties to maintain the brand of the character. Iizuka and Sonic Team would give Big Red Button feedback during the development of Rise of Lyric, choosing and critiquing what changes were acceptable and denying changes they believed went against Sonic’s character. Rafei also explains that cultural differences came into play when considering acceptable changes for the character. He says while Westerners may want to try different things, Easterners are much more rooted in maintaining the historical representation and "legacy of the brand." According to Rafei, Iizuka told Big Red Button that he always has to consider the "ghosts of Sonic" when there’s a discussion about changing the themes or style of the franchise. "Sometimes it would be very difficult to understand what exactly was the concern and we had to really drill deeper to figure out what [were] the subtleties that [weren’t] working for [Sega]," Rafei says. He also says that Big Red Button spent a lot of time on things such as Sonic’s eyes and proportions in order to make them fit Sonic Team’s vision. "It makes sense, because, you know, we’re moved on now from Sonic, but Sonic Team has to live with that," Rafei says. "So, we wanted to make sure that we were the proper stewards of the brand." Because Sega gave Big Red Button the mandate to try something different, it tried to push the game as far as it could. In hindsight, Rafei says had he known that it was being too ambitious, Big Red Button might have been more conservative with its approach. But he feels that it was his team's job to bring a different type of thinking to the game as a developer outside of Sega. "Sonic has a very complicated relationship to his fans and the industry." "If we were to stick to the brand canon, I think we would not be doing Sega the justice that they wanted from this relationship," Rafei says. "What I realized," Rafei continues, "is that Sonic has a very complicated relationship to his fans and the industry. A lot of people feel that they are entitled to Sonic because of their growing up with him and the feelings they associate with him." As fans grow older, he says, they have mixed feelings about who the character is. "Once we came out with something different, some embraced it very powerfully and others did not," Rafei says. He hopes the game will stand the test of time because it tried to do something different for the brand, but admits that it is ultimately up to history and the game community to decide. Similarly, when asked where he personally believes Sonic should go in the future, Rafei says, "That’s not a question that I have any authority to answer. I think that’s really for the fans and the gaming community at large to make that assessment."



Sega's hopeful future for Sonic In July of 2015, Haruki Satomi, the CEO of Sega Games, said in an interview with Weekly Famitsu magazine that the Sega games released in the previous 10 years "partially betrayed" the trust of the company’s longtime fans. He also stated that the company would "like to win back the customers' trust and become a brand once again." Iizuka tells Polygon he hopes Sonic games will be a part of the solution by putting a greater emphasis on quality. Iizuka does not wash his hands completely of Sega’s problems. He cites Rise of Lyric, explaining how priority was put into shipping the title rather than quality and fan expectation. He also admits that Sonic Team wasn’t "deeply involved" with the game’s development. Iizuka says that Sonic Team wants to build a new internal standard for its products, giving the team the necessary resources to craft something that lives up to fans’ expectations. "When you buy a Sonic game, we want you to see that Sega logo on the package and know that you’re getting a great experience," he says. "Ideally, I want Sonic to be a character loved both by people who play games and by those who don’t." To achieve this, Iizuka says Sonic Team needs to keep the franchise expanding, pushing Sonic further into other medias such as television, movies and merchandising, as well as expanding on the types of games Sonic appears in. It also means keeping the character a "nostalgic icon of [fans'] childhood."

Sega speaks optimistically about Sonic’s future, as one would expect, and says it wants to please fans who think back positively on the series’ roots.

"I want to make him a character who continues to be iconic and remains relevant as one of the first cool characters a child might see," Iizuka says. Iizuka brings up Rise of Lyric several times in his interview with Polygon. Criticism of the game from fans and media alike has taken a toll on the company, he says, and it isn’t eager to make the same mistake twice. "Because [Rise of Lyric] tried a different take on Sonic from the norm — and considering the results — this made Sonic Team feel that we want to build a Sonic title which represents the evolution of the Sonic series over the last 20 years," Iizuka says on what future Sonic games may look like. He continues, saying that "modern Sonic won’t be changing his design in games anytime soon." Iizuka wants the character to remain the same five, even 10, years from now. "Though the character won’t change, we do think that the games should always be open to evolving and constantly improving themselves," he says. "We use our Sonic Team logo as a brand for those titles that we feel confident in, and though Sonic has evolved and changed much in terms of gameplay as we found what worked best, we want to keep creating good games so that Sonic Team’s logo will always stand as a mark of quality." Speaking specifically about mobile Sonic games, COO of Sega Networks, Sega’s mobile division, Chris Olson tells Polygon, "In the earlier day of mobile development, there was a tendency to kind of bring things out immediately. Those days are kind of gone. Consumer expectations have been raised." He explains that the company only has one chance at releasing a game to customers. "The business is always a conflict of weighing bringing a title to market and making the yearly plan versus maybe waiting and bringing something else." "The business is always a conflict of weighing bringing a title to market and making the yearly plan versus maybe waiting and bringing something else," Olson says. "We have an obligation to the fans of Sonic and the consumer, so something we learned is we can look forward to a greater focus on the quality." Olson, like Iizuka, points to the way the Sonic series has expanded into other medias, speaking specifically about the success of the Sonic Boom TV show and how the mobile-only Sonic Dash has been downloaded 120 million times. "We want to bring Sonic wherever gamers are," Olson says. "We want to bring high-quality games to market." As media continues to evolve, and Sonic has to go up against entertainment options such as Netflix, Spotify and Hulu, Olson explains that it becomes hard to compare how the current state of the series stacks up to the weight it carried 10 or 20 years ago but confirms Sega is reaching more people than it did during the Genesis generation. "We obviously want to appeal to as many people as possible but still focus on what it means to be Sonic and a Sonic game," Olson says. "Maybe that might lose some fans along the road, but we’re picking up new fans that will hopefully grow with us as Sonic grows."

