I was once told I was "the Blue Spheres guy," whatever the hell that means. Not that I don't value the recognition of my deep and unwavering love for Get Blue Spheres, the best special stage in the classic Sonic the Hedgehog series. Thankfully, Sega knew little freaks like me would want to play more than the meager 14 levels found across the entirety of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, so some genius at Sonic Team devised a way for Sonic & Knuckles to look at the ROM header of games locked onto it and generate new Blue Spheres levels based on what it finds. You know what that means?

UNLIMITED BLUE SPHERES!

Now, imagine being a kid in 1994, frequently using the level select cheat in Sonic 3 & Knuckles to play the special stages for fun. One day you pop in Sonic the Hedgehog thinking, I don't know, maybe it'll finally put Knuckles in the game this time, because you're 7-years-old and dumber than a brick. Of course it doesn't, but as you mash the buttons on the controller out of frustration, you happen to tap A+B+C simultaneously, unlocking the full Blue Sphere experience. I felt like I had broken out of the Matrix.

The way this all operates is pretty smart. As mentioned, Sonic & Knuckles looks at the ROM header of attached games, and based on the numerical value of the header, different prefab parts of a Blue Sphere stage are assembled. In total, there's 134,217,728 possible combinations, and when playing with Sonic the Hedgehog locked on, the player can freely edit the values of a header located on the bottom of the screen to play through them all (or they can be played sequentially.) So, how do you "beat" Blue Sphere? Conventional wisdom would say you have to clear over a hundred million levels, but that's just not feasible, so instead I locked on every single Genesis cart I own and beat the resulting levels. I feel like this is good enough to mark it as complete, but it should be a federal crime to log this game as "mastered" if you don't play and perfect all 134,217,728 levels. As the resident "blue sphere guy" I should be deputized and given the authority to ban people who fail to comply.

As a mode, Blue Spheres is unsurprisingly my favorite among the classic Sonic special stages. These were always designed as technical set pieces, more concerned with showing off than creating something particularly fun to play, but Sonic Team finished strong with this one. Each level is its own puzzle to figure out, and in the case of the "stand alone" game, the interlocking nature of each stage's prefabricated parts heightens the level of problem-solving involved due to how confounding some of the resulting layouts can be. I find this to be pretty engaging, though some presets seem to be more common than others, and when you have a stack of 26 games to go through, you'll probably start to see some levels with a few too many repeating parts.

Not that this totally kills my enjoyment, of course, as I can always use my increasing familiarity with certain stage elements as an excuse to begin perfecting runs. I think it was a really smart move to put this additional layer of ring collecting on top of grabbing blue spheres, as it challenges the player to consider how to collect every ring before ending the stage early, and getting a "perfect" provides a means of marking the player's skill that prior special stages did not.


None of this would work if the player felt like they lacked control over Sonic, and any dip in performance that resulted in colliding with a dreaded red sphere would make the whole thing come crashing down. Thankfully, Sonic Team was able to push beyond the choppy nature of Sonic 2's halfpipes and awful performance of Sonic CD's UFO hunts, and though it runs at a compromised 30fps, Blue Spheres is at least consistent and predictable. I also love the theme music. Probably one of my favorite tracks in the entire series, and I am endlessly amused by it being reused from SegaSonic Bros, (not that this series is any stranger to recycling music.) Some of my earliest memories are of my parents on the cusp of divorce arguing in the next room, and me cranking the volume up while playing Blue Spheres so the music would drown them out.

Thank you for being part of my childhood, Blue Spheres!