Sonic games are a far cry from what they used to be. In the ’90s, SEGA was in direct competition with Nintendo. SEGA had Sonic, Nintendo had Mario.
Seeing the two mascots in the same
game would have been impossible at
the time.
My ten-year-old self would never believe me if I told him.
Fast forward to today and Sonic is almost a joke (Just google Sanic if you don’t believe me.) Well at least SEGA says they know they’ve made some mistakes.
“The quality of console games in the Sonic franchise hasn’t been acceptable over recent years,” said SEGA Europe’s Marketing Director Jon Rooke in an interview with tech business website Marketing week.
So what happened, how did Sonic and SEGA fall so far? After the Dreamcast, SEGA’s track record started to fill up with failures. Things really got bad in 2006 when SEGA released Sonic the hedgehog, or infamously known as Sonic ’06. This is the game that gave us backwards snowboarding and broken physics (among so many other things.)
It didn’t end there, though. After a few steady years of okay games like Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations, SEGA released Sonic Boom, another game filled with glitches, such as the infamous Knuckles “flying” bug.
It’s about as ridiculous as it looks, and requires you to unpause and pause the game with Knuckles, which will allow you to jump infinitely.
Good news then that SEGA says they’re aware that the Sonic games have been in pretty bad shape lately. They say their strategy is to listen to what the fans want.
We’ll see how well they can listen, considering they ignored their quality assurance testers on Sonic Boom.
