My aunt once told me she regretted giving me a Mater System when I was three. She is just nine years my senior, so it’s not like she had outgrown video games by then. She had no cartridges and could play Sonic the Hedgehog in the console’s memory, which might maybe have been boring to her — but to me, since I’d visit her only on weekends and didn’t know what a video game was, that was the most mesmerizing gadget imaginable. More than that: my concept of imagination was founded by those bright colors and jazzy, if crunched, music. And mesmerized by Sonic I was, which she noticed, and so she ended up giving her hard-earned video game console to me. “Had I known how obsessed you and your brother would become over it, even now,” she said many years later, “I wouldn’t have done it”. She did change my life with that gesture, because I learned the language of games with a Sonic game for the Master System.
This is deeply influential in a number of ways. To this day, the way I’ll approach any new game resembles the childish curiosity with which I approached that game, and a certain set of expectations was created alongside said curiosity. This applies to all of you: the way you first approached games, and what you came to expect from them, as well as your history with them, colors your analyses. So I’m giving you full disclosure: in a very fundamental, irrational level, if you ever disagree with me about games, that might be (among other things) because I learned how to play games with Sonic on the Mater System.
And that game is very peculiar, in that it’s quite a bit more methodical than most other Sonic games: each act in each zone is completely different from all the other acts in all the other zones, and makes it very clear. Each act in each stage has exactly one 1-Up monitor, and hides it differently; getting 100 rings gives you a life, but resets your ring counter; however, carrying 99 rings to the end of the stage brings you 9900 points, and every 50000 points will also give you an extra life. So getting to the end of the game involves a lot of figuring out, which, for a kid that’s pretty bad at the game and dies a lot, is a big deal. It’s very cerebral, in a number of ways, because planning and strategizing your performance just in order to survive becomes very important.
However, there was no way to figure that stuff out other than just trying things out and moving around a stage, because if the only thing I can control and use to interact with the environment is Sonic itself, he’s also some sort of cursor in a computer screen — except he doesn’t always act the way I want, or I end up finding something I didn’t want. This means I had to play the very best I could at every step of the way, because I could never rely on rings to back me up — unlike you Sonic 2 for the Mega Drive snobs could. At the same time, each step was presented as somewhat self-contained, as a challenge that I wouldn’t find anywhere else in the game, not in the same way. This stage is an auto-scroller; this other one is a vertical level, and you’ll die if you fall; this one has this section leading up to a 1-Up monitor, from which it’s arbitrarily and randomly near-impossible to get out alive.
That’s especially true for the Chaos Emeralds. You can see them just by playing normally, but learning how to get there often feels wrong (like getting hurt on purpose to get the emerald in Labyrinth Zone, because you couldn’t yet dream of being good enough to get it with the Invincibility from the monitor earlier still active). So there’s a choreography to it that’s less apparent in other Sonic games, but also an unruliness that’s less apparent in other games in general. As I grew up a little, I had access to other games (still not knowing what a Mega Drive was) and, most importantly, to other platformers. Which were fun and communicated their challenges much more clearly, but then gave me a sense that I was learning to do things as I was told, and the character was no longer a cursor for exploring the game’s system, whereas Sonic never intended to teach me anything.
Having learned how to appreciate this delicate balance, when I got around to discovering every game Sonic had to offer, that’s how I approached them too, and this led me to like the slower-paced or the strange bouncy assholes of later or weirder Sonic stages. So I love Marble Zone, Labyrinth Zone, Sandopolis and the entirety of Sonic CD. Because they feel more like Sonic 1 for the Master System, so they feel more like home.
This is deeply influential in a number of ways. To this day, the way I’ll approach any new game resembles the childish curiosity with which I approached that game, and a certain set of expectations was created alongside said curiosity. This applies to all of you: the way you first approached games, and what you came to expect from them, as well as your history with them, colors your analyses. So I’m giving you full disclosure: in a very fundamental, irrational level, if you ever disagree with me about games, that might be (among other things) because I learned how to play games with Sonic on the Mater System.
And that game is very peculiar, in that it’s quite a bit more methodical than most other Sonic games: each act in each zone is completely different from all the other acts in all the other zones, and makes it very clear. Each act in each stage has exactly one 1-Up monitor, and hides it differently; getting 100 rings gives you a life, but resets your ring counter; however, carrying 99 rings to the end of the stage brings you 9900 points, and every 50000 points will also give you an extra life. So getting to the end of the game involves a lot of figuring out, which, for a kid that’s pretty bad at the game and dies a lot, is a big deal. It’s very cerebral, in a number of ways, because planning and strategizing your performance just in order to survive becomes very important.
However, there was no way to figure that stuff out other than just trying things out and moving around a stage, because if the only thing I can control and use to interact with the environment is Sonic itself, he’s also some sort of cursor in a computer screen — except he doesn’t always act the way I want, or I end up finding something I didn’t want. This means I had to play the very best I could at every step of the way, because I could never rely on rings to back me up — unlike you Sonic 2 for the Mega Drive snobs could. At the same time, each step was presented as somewhat self-contained, as a challenge that I wouldn’t find anywhere else in the game, not in the same way. This stage is an auto-scroller; this other one is a vertical level, and you’ll die if you fall; this one has this section leading up to a 1-Up monitor, from which it’s arbitrarily and randomly near-impossible to get out alive.
That’s especially true for the Chaos Emeralds. You can see them just by playing normally, but learning how to get there often feels wrong (like getting hurt on purpose to get the emerald in Labyrinth Zone, because you couldn’t yet dream of being good enough to get it with the Invincibility from the monitor earlier still active). So there’s a choreography to it that’s less apparent in other Sonic games, but also an unruliness that’s less apparent in other games in general. As I grew up a little, I had access to other games (still not knowing what a Mega Drive was) and, most importantly, to other platformers. Which were fun and communicated their challenges much more clearly, but then gave me a sense that I was learning to do things as I was told, and the character was no longer a cursor for exploring the game’s system, whereas Sonic never intended to teach me anything.
Having learned how to appreciate this delicate balance, when I got around to discovering every game Sonic had to offer, that’s how I approached them too, and this led me to like the slower-paced or the strange bouncy assholes of later or weirder Sonic stages. So I love Marble Zone, Labyrinth Zone, Sandopolis and the entirety of Sonic CD. Because they feel more like Sonic 1 for the Master System, so they feel more like home.