© 2024 KMUW
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Your Move: Happy Birthday Sonic!

A good friend of mine turned 25 years old last week. Sonic the Hedgehog debuted on June 23, 1991, propelling the Sega Genesis forward in the marketplace and making it a true competitor to Nintendo’s NES.

The first console I ever had was a Genesis, and packed with it were copies of the first two Sonic games. I eventually got other games for the Genesis, but none of them ever spent as much time in the cartridge slot as those two games did. They’re some of my favorite games of all time, and I still play through them a few times a year.

At times, though, it’s been pretty hard to be a Sonic fan. Although the first several games were fantastic, quality with later Sonic games has been all over the place. Games like Sonic Advance, Sonic Adventure, and Sonic Colors have been great, but for every one of those, there are games like Sonic Boom and the 2006 Sonic the Hedgehog game, which were both so buggy as to be literally unplayable at times. That, and they weren’t much fun.

Even Sega’s CEO Hajime Satomi admits that they’ve lost the trust of fans in the last 10 years, and I wouldn’t disagree. At the same time, however, at a Tokyo event celebrating the anniversary, Sega announced that there will be a new Sonic game coming in 2017. Full details will be coming during this year’s San Diego Comic Con, during a live-streamed event. I’m hopeful that Sega has learned from their past failures and might put together a game that captures what made those first Sonic titles games that I’m still playing 25 years later.

Samuel McConnell is a games enthusiast who has been playing games in one form or another since 1991. He was born in northern Maine but quickly transplanted to Wichita.