Why I Love Classic Sonic

A personal video on what I love about the classic era of Sonic, and why I have made peace with the fact that it will forever remain in the past.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
4:07 Creating an Icon
11:09 Sonic the Hedgehog
25:25 Development of Sonic 2
34:42 Sonic the Hedgehog 2
50:28 Sonic 3 & Knuckles
1:12:59 Interlude - Memories with Classic Sonic
1:17:23 End of an Era
1:21:29 Sonic CD
1:31:49 Conclusion

Special thanks to Sonic Retro for being a fantastic resource on all things Sonic. Used for a lot of my research.

Also big thanks to KingK for helping me with the script!

Video Sources

Online Sources

Written Sources

Retro Gamer, Issues 45, 175
Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation

[poweroffriendship.]

People talk about how great Classic Sonic is, but Classic Dr. Eggman is the most fascinating one. It's funny how a caricature of Theodore Roosevelt in pajamas became one of the most iconic video game villains of all time.

(PINGAS)

[MugiMikey]

This was a really enjoyable ride. Awesome video!!

[GameApologist]

Oh neat, I think I'll check these games out. They sound kinda fun!

[daseal]

"The open sky, is blue forever. No matter how bad things get, the beautiful blue sky will always be there." That's truly a beautiful quote, no joke. Thanks for being you Liam Triforce.

[grygoo]

Sonic 1 - platforming
Sonic 2 - speed
Sonic CD - exploration
Sonic 3&K and Mania - perfectly balanced

[Harrinsain]

45:39 there's actually a third path here and a second way to skip the moving block section. if you go past the secret room you talk about here and continue on the main path, when you come to the tubes that wind up and down which lead you to the vertical corridor with the blocks, you can launch Sonic off the inclines of those pipes and fling him up to the top of that room from the outside up to where the horizontally moving platforms are. The easiest way to do it is just to hit the speed booster at the start of the pipes and jump off the first incline while holding right. People rag on the moving block section in that level, but it's honestly one of the most well designed parts of Sonic 2. Classic Sonic punishes poor performance or an unwillingness to experiment with Sonic's mechanics with unintuitive design. The best levels in the series will typically use these slow, clunky sections as a punishment, as if to say "oh, so you don't want to engage with me? Fine, have it your way.".

Another example of this is Spring Yard Act 1, where you can completely skip both instances of needing to wait for moving blocks if you know what you're doing. The same can be said of the first loop in Green Hill act 1, where, if you jump inside the loop at just the right time, then again on the incline immediately after, Sonic will have just enough speed to make it up to the higher path without having to stop and use the slow moving platforms to get up there. Those moving platforms are the punishment. you're given a way up there even if you fail, but you're punished with inconvenience.

In other words; your skill is the only thing limiting your freedom

[reagansido]

That surprised me so much when you showed the 3 mascots people picked from and EGGMAN was one of them. Fricking EGGMAN! He could have been the protagonist! I can't even imagine how Sonic would go about being the bad guy, or how Eggman would go about being the good guy!

[GiffanyCD]

Honestly, Sonic CD might still be one of my favorite games of all time, I've been suppressing it more recently, but I still adore everything about it, The Time Travel, the Music (oh god the music), the atmosphere, it's all just so beautiful

[avebave]

I remember buying the sonic mega collection, it was so random. I remember being at a CVS on mother's day looking for a gift for her, but also saw it for 20 bucks and grabbed that along with flowers 😭 that was a fun day

[Overbound]

"We could've witnessed Metal Sonic's journey into cognizance as he grapples between what he was designed to do and what his personality is telling him to do." - EXACTLY. I've been thinking this for YEARS.

[quonit]

One really interesting quote I heard once is that "the first time you play a sonic level will be the worst time." Because you're just seeing the level for the first time, and Sonic is ALL ABOUT replayablity and getting better and better. It's REWARDING to go back and BREEZE through the level and find secrets and get that higher ring count. Sonic is one of those rare games that are better on replay.

[nessesaryschoolthing]

The more you talked about the difficulty curve and the joy of mastering these games, the more I thought how this kind of game design is unfortunately less and less viable now.

In this era, home consoles were still pretty new, cartridges were expensive, so if you had games at all you could expect to have a small collection, few enough to count on your fingers (+toes if you're lucky). Games had to last you a while. At the same time, they were extremely limited in how much data you could fit on a cartridge, so you couldn't exactly make a giant game with endless horizons to explore. You can't port Skyrim to Sega Genesis.

It was ideal for a game to provide challenge beyond the surface level, to have multiple ways to traverse the same old levels, and to fill what little space it had with attention to detail, all to be as replayable as possible. Games could be frustrating and unrewarding at first, but as long as it wasn't ridiculously hard (which plenty of poorly made games were at the time), they could expect you to keep coming back, to TRY to have fun with the game you had. In doing so, you would learn and master the game and form a deep relationship and familiarity with it. They could expect you to not only earn endings, collectables, and achievements, but earn the fun of the game itself.

But even when I was a kid, that didn't make as much sense anymore. Disks were cheaper. The market was more saturated. Now it's absolutely saturated with several generations of games and consoles, remakes/ remasters/ re-releases, a thriving indie scene, cheap games, free games, steam sales, emulation, piracy, etc. Chances are, if you have games at all, you can expect to be able to play almost any game you want to.

And this is definitely a good thing, but it means that our relationship with games is different. If a game is not fun right away, we don't have the same incentive to come back to it and TRY to have fun with it. We can just as easily find another game that's fun right away. Games have become more disposable. Developers know that they have to hook the player right away or they won't keep playing long enough to see when the game becomes fun. Instead of being earned through mastery, the most enjoyable aspects of a game have to be frontloaded. As such, mastery becomes less rewarding, less meaningful, more disappointing. Our relationships with both games we enjoy and don't are more shallow

Or I don't know, maybe it's just me

[Furluge]

Fun Fact: Sega's originally an American company. Sega is short for SErvice GAmes which would provide coinop machines on military bases. If you look at the history of the company and who managed it it's easy to see how and why Sega had such a strong presence in America, very different from how Nintendo worked. The blowup between the two branches that culminated in 1996 with Tom Kalinske being sacked and Rosen and Nakayama resigning their positions contributed a lot to the the failure of the Dreamcast and the loss of their console market.

[matthewcorrie]

I'm so glad that I'm not the only one who loves Knuckles' hat in the OVA.

[millythompsonfromtrigunanime]

Classic Sonic goes hard. Every era of Sonic has at least one of my favorite video games ever but the classic games are consistently some of the most fun games I've ever played.

[beeperonithend]

This video single-handedly changed my entire perspective on Sonic forever probably... I was always stuck up on saying the classic games and adventure games where what the series should have been forever, but now I'm seeing that it's not always cloudy days outside. I do have hope for the series in the future with whatever changes they make and have to offer, and I will learn to appreciate and love whatever new incarnation of Sonic they make.

[NoCareLuke]

My household never owned a Nintendo console back when I was young, me and my brothers had a Mega Drive, Sonic 1+2 (with 3 and Sonic and Knuckles down the line) and a compilation cart with Streets of Rage and Columns on it. I absolutely adored how crunchy and grungy the Mega Drive's sound chip was and Chemical Plant Zone's music will always live rent-free in my subconsious.

It was only till the Gamecube that we got a Nintendo console in the house, but Sega always wormed itself back into my life with SA2 Battle and Super Monkey Ball taking up my play time. Now, I look back to those days while playing Yakuza and Sonic Mania.

Once a Sega kid, always a Sega kid.

[ElementalAndFlorchy]

That was such a heart warming video, I usually NEVER post coments, but I've discovered video games with Sonic, and the classic era have been sticking with me for like 15 years. I had forgot how good they were and the impact they had on me, but this reminded me all of this, and now it makes me want to play Sonic 3 again, still one of the best games ever for me. Thank you so much for doing such a video!

[RickachuCXVI]

I never knew how much I loved listening to video essays about video games until I watch the Game Apologist's sonic 3 unapologetic video. Something about seeing someone passionately talk about something as "childish" and "unimportant" as a blue hedgehog really touched home with me. Eventually I ended up on this channel while looking for some retrospectives on the Zelda series. It's always great to see these videos because it means I get to listen to and learn from someone geeking out about a hobby I've spent literally my whole waking life entranced with. Keep at it Liam 👍

[leandronc]

Oh, man, when you fell into the pit at the end of the Sonic 2 section I nearly choked on my drink! I had no idea this was a thing, so cool! Chris Whitehead is a beast! Sonic was my childhood, I got Sonic 2 for my birthday in January 1993.