SELF IMPROVEMENT

sonic the hedgehog Ol Of late, Sonic the Hedgehog, one of the shining princes of my listless, shambling, over-sugared childhood, has started to remind me of the American Tea Party movement. While Mario's soared into space and bounced around the universe, Sonic's been on a different kind of adventure. As Nintendo and SEGA fans were my school's version of the Sharks and the Jets, with only a faintly diminished propensity for stabby dance-offs, he became a dangerous associate in the wrong part of the playground. (Luckily, SEGA magazines at the time provided followers with plenty of pithy ammunition for nasty encounters, in the form of anti-Nintendo jokes. Typical example: How do you spot a Nintendo owner at a barn dance? Ha!)
The spiky mascot looked just brilliant decked out in company blue, the sing-song cry of SEY-GAH! Mario's worlds always had an implied handmade quality, even before Yoshi's Island made their craftiness explicit, but Sonic's levels looked like they were sliced out of coloured glass by robot-wielded lasers. Plus they were called "zones", which gave them a kind of futuristic Crystal Maze/Running Man chic.
I first encountered SEGA's new mascot in the pages of a friend's Mean Machines in one of my school's portakabin classrooms. Sharp, angular backdrops, rich blues and greens, and a hero who spent most of the time as a rakish, trainer-shod blur.
A lot's been made of just how big a role Mario had to play in the creation of Sonic. A lot's been made of the fact that Mario used two buttons, so Sonic would only use one, that Mario tended to dawdle, so Sonic would tap his foot impatiently if you left him waiting too long.
Years after completing Sonic the Hedgehog, when I read hippyish urban monologist Reyner Banham suggest that LA's freeway system spoke "the language of movement, not monument", I thought, "Ooh, a bit like Spring Yard Zone," and then lavishly failed my entire cultural geography unit. Banham might have been onto something, though, because Sonic's levels are a bit like freeways: a bold line threading past distant horizons. (That lecturer always did hate me, anyway.)