It’s been 25 years since the debut of the Sonic Adventure Series. With Sonic x Shadow: Generations, and the Sonic 3 movie just around the corner, now is a good time to explore the games that serve as inspiration for these upcoming titles. The nostalgic and beloved Sonic Adventure (SA) series! What happened to it and why have we not had anything like SA1 and SA2 after the release of Sonic Heroes? Let’s examine what elements captured our love for the SA series overall. Hint: it’s not the gameplay.
Sonic’s New Design Was a Smash Hit!
For all you millennial sonic fans, think back to 1998. You just heard the news that a new Sonic game would be released on Sega’s latest console, the Sega Dreamcast. As Sonic fans, we’re going nuts! We’re excited and can’t wait to see what Sega has in store for the next 3D high-speed adventure of their number one mascot. Everyone had questions. Will it be better than Mario 64? Will it still even feel like a Sonic game? Will all our favorite characters be there?
Jump ahead to the release date of 12/23/1998. You’re either returning home from the store in the back of your parent’s car or perhaps unwrapping the game as a present two days later. The cover art is amazing. Sonic has a new design. He’s no longer the cute, sort-of Mickey Mouse-like cartoon. He’s a teenage dude with attitude and swagger that reflects modern pop culture. His pose is wacky, his smile is arrogant and snarky, and the overall vibe you get from it is “This Sonic is from the streets”. And the creator of the new design pictured above, Satoshi Okano, even confirmed this:
“I wanted to give Sonic a timeless, cutting-edge image, I was raised on and inspired by American Sci-Fi movies, New York hip-hop, sneaker and street culture, and UK industrial rock music. My inspirations were George Lucas and Steven Spielburg movies, Nike basketball shoes, the Adidas tracksuits RUN DMC wore in their 1988 photoshoots, Flavor Flav’s clock and glasses, De la Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Jungle Brothers lyrics, Bjork, Underworld, and other music, music videos, and artwork like that.”
Much love and influence from American culture in the late 80s and 90s went into the new character designs. We didn’t know this, but we felt it through the art and music. For the first time in video game history, Sonic is from the streets in a city setting that resembles New York (Station Square), with humans other than Dr. Robotnik (Eggman). Sonic has finally come to our world, and he is looking fly! One thing becomes clear to us; this is a new kind of Sonic with a new backstory and a new universe separate from Sonic 3 and Knuckle’s saga. We can’t wait to fire up the game.
The Music Got Us Pumped (Some of It)!
The Sonic series has always had great music both in the menus and during gameplay. The original Green Hill Zone theme is almost as iconic as the Super Mario Bro’s original theme, and let’s not forget the Flying Battery Zone theme from Sonic and Knuckles. It would make you stop playing for a few seconds just to sit there and listen until Sonic stared at you impatiently in-game. Music helps immerse you in the games you play, and there’s no question that the band, Crush 40, did this flawlessly with the first song we listened to in the Intro of SA1, Open Your Heart.
Upon starting the game, we were greeted with an unforgettable intro that blew our minds. We see Sonic racing through the forests and the city, Eggman posing on top of his giant ship as it takes off with a dark background, Knuckles and Tails fly into action with explosions in the background as if it was a Micheal Bay film, Amy walking down a city street, looking over her shoulder at Eggman’s ship as it casts it’s shadow on her and the other civilians around her. And then we see three brand-new characters.
Big the Cat looking up to the dark, lightning-filled sky (let’s be honest, nobody knew he was a cat upon first seeing him), E-102 Gamma firing Its weapon in the face of the camera with the smoke settling, and then the almighty Chaos taking over a skyscraper with a Godzilla-like presence. All this new CGI imagery accompanied by Crush 40’s Open Your Heart rock music was a nerdgasm that had us pumped and feeling like we were ready to go fast and furious. And it stuck with us in the menu.
SA2 also had its smash hit with Live and Learn (also by Crush 40) playing in the intro and menus with just as much visual delight. Not all of the music in the SA series was good, but most of it worked perfectly and each character had a unique song that fit them, and they were catchy. You can guarantee that there are people who can rap Knuckles’s theme from SA1 or sing City Escape from SA2, almost word for word because they’re that catchy.
Overall, there’s no doubt that the Sonic Adventure series just had the right music for everyone. From Sonic’s hard rock to Knuckle’s hyphy hip-hop to even Shadow’s edgy techno, the music was a vibe we just can’t forget. If you still aren’t convinced, the next time you go for a run, try listening to SA2’s soundtrack from in-game levels, like White Jungle’s Rhythm and Balance, Radical Highway’s Vengeance is Mine, or Pumpkin Hill’s A Ghost’s Pumpkin Soup.
More Mature, or Just “Edgy”?
This hot take still seems to have fans of the franchise divided, “was the Sonic Adventure series darker and more mature or was it just edgy to the point of cringe?”. For those of you who side with “just edgy”, you may want to recall that Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 introduced us to a new setting, a world filled with real human beings who had their lives threatened, and some that even died from drowning or being shot to death. There are themes of identity crisis and gaslighting that don’t quite resonate with children as much as they do with teenagers and young adults, which will be discussed later.
You may think these themes were too dark for a game marketed towards kids, and you’re right. This is why none of the aforementioned deaths happened on screen. However, they were heavily implied through dialogue and the player’s inference. If you played to the very end of SA1 and unlocked that character, then you met the final villain, Perfect Chaos, who was (more or less) a kaiju who managed to flood the entire city. After watching the cutscene where you saw water flooding into the streets from every direction in massive waves, it was absurd to assume that no one drowned.
Even after you defeated Perfect Chaos, things didn’t just return to normal. The city was still underwater, and people were undoubtedly still trapped inside the buildings. In that final battle, you could feel the rage and anger in your character as you clashed with Chaos while Open Your Heart blared in the background. It was epic but also, pretty dark knowing that your character already failed to save innocent lives.
Team Dark Gave Sonic a Nuanced Story
SA2 gets even darker when we are introduced to Shadow the “Edgelord” Hedgehog. Upon his debut, Shadow was widely accepted by fans despite being criticized for being too brooding and featuring the use of guns in his own game in 2005. But wouldn’t all of us be dark and brooding if we saw the person who we cared about most get shot in cold blood? That’s exactly what happened to Maria Robotnik, Shadow’s dearest friend and late relative of the franchise’s main villain, Eggman. It’s no wonder Keanu Reeves was chosen to play Shadow in the upcoming Sonic 3. The themes of revenge, and having a dark, edgy personality are very John Wick. Maria was to Shadow what John Wick’s Dog was to him.
Although completely sweet and innocent, Maria met her fate after saving Shadow from being captured by the Guardian Unit of Nations (GUN), who boarded the space station of Gerald Robotnik (Eggman and Maria’s late grandfather) to find Shadow and terminate him, believing that he was a dangerous weapon that Geralt had been developing for nefarious purposes, the “ultimate lifeform”.
The last thing Shadow sees before Maria ejects him into space in an escape pod against his will is the agents of GUN breaching the room they were in and aiming their weapons at her. We don’t see her die, but our imagination fills in the details, and other source materials outside the game confirm she was shot. Maria did not survive, and Shadow would continue to be haunted by her death to the point where he promised himself to get revenge for her. By today’s standards, the theme of revenge is a little too dark for kids, but we never had a Sonic game with this much story context and established lore. Because we weren’t expecting that, it drew us in.
The Stakes Were Very High
It’s also worth mentioning that Dr. Eggman held Amy Rose hostage at gunpoint halfway through SA2. In the same game, he held the entire world hostage using the Deathstar-like Eclipse Cannon of the Space Colony Arch, as he broadcasted to the entire world that it would be destroyed if the people of Earth didn’t surrender and submit to him.
He even used the cannon to destroy half the moon as a show of force. You may think it’s not a big deal since he used similar threats and weapons in Sonic 2 and 3, such as the Death Egg (more American sci-fi-inspired themes) but again, the Adventure series introduced human beings and Earth. It was more personal this time, and the thought of him obliterating all of us made the tone so much darker and more serious.
Gerald would also betray his grandson, Eggman, by tricking him into thinking he could use the Space Colony Arch for his own benefit. However, in a post-mortem message found after activating the arch’s secret programming, Eggman is horrified to learn that his grandfather’s message turned out to be a final middle finger to the people of Earth for ending the life of his granddaughter, Maria (Eggman’s Cousin) when all he wanted to do was find a cure for her fatal disease using research from “Project Shadow”. This plot twist was filled with much grief and despair. The Arch became hijacked by Gerald’s experiment, the Biolizard, and began hurling towards Earth in an Armageddon fashion with all heroes and villains still onboard.
Rouge the Bat Gaslighting Shadow
Rouge the Bat was another new character in the game who had a kind of promiscuous aura about her, and a curvy character design that some would say may have been too much, but the point was that she was a “bad girl”. Her debut gleaned a cult following of fans that she still has today. In SA2, she was a problem for both Knuckles and Shadow, but her working relationship with the latter was purely manipulative. She got into his head by showing him an old news article about “Project Shadow”, which turned out to be the true supposed secret weapon that Geralt Robotnik was developing.
This led Shadow to start experiencing an identity crisis because, for the entire time after losing Maria, Shadow proclaimed himself to be the ultimate lifeform in existence, designed to “save” Maria. He used that identity to fuel his purpose in life and drive his desire for revenge. But thanks to Rouge, he learns that was never the case. It was an entirely different creature, the Biolizard, that would “save” Maria. That was “Project Shadow” and Gerald was using that creature for research to cure Maria’s deadly disease. Not Shadow. So then who was “Shadow the Hedgehog” now that he had his identity and purpose pulled out from underneath him?
This information was exactly what Shadow needed for his character development which would make him a hero at the end of the game, but identity crisis was something that most teenagers at the time (namely, millennials) resonated with because they were going through a natural stage of psychosocial development, the conflict of Identity vs role confusion. Kids who played the game probably understood the plot twist but the feeling of “I’m not who I think I am / not who I’m meant to be” didn’t quite hit them the way it hit teenagers at the time. Although, they would probably never admit that out loud.
Memorable Villains
Overall, these themes of death, identity crisis, and gaslighting are mostly thanks to the villains in each story, but they are nonetheless present and part of what made these games so memorable. We haven’t seen them in the Sonic franchise before. The voice acting combined with the cut scenes was also new and never before done, and it brought the experience to life in a way that just wasn’t possible in the early 90’s due to technological limitations. Sonic was always a beloved video game character and the fact that he transitioned to the modern age of new tech crystalized his fame in the history of video games.
In Conclusion: What Happened to Sonic Adventure?
The Sonic Adventure series fell off the radar after 2002. There were remasters for the GameCube like SA2: Battle, and SA DX. The game stopped being ported to other consoles in 2011. Many fans of the series were hopeful that the rumored and infamous Sonic 06 would be the SA3 that everyone was waiting for, but that wasn’t the case. SA 1 and 2 were unique in ways that some just can’t find the words to describe. Nevertheless, it was a series for its time and many millennials remember them as the peak of Sonic games, not because of the gameplay, but because of the new established story context and in-depth lore with new 3d graphics and popular music genres.
The stakes were very high in each game, and the fact that we as humans of Earth were introduced in the story for the first time made them more special and felt more personal for the player. The new design for the characters was upgraded to reflect modernity, the music went above and beyond in terms of quality, and the technology that brought the world to life in 3D and gave us voice acting was so new and amazing. We didn’t care how bad the animation was, or how poor and effortless the voice acting was delivered (Seriously, go back and play SA1 and you’ll laugh at how bad the animation and voice acting were).
You can call it nostalgia, but there’s no doubt that all subsequent Sonic games after the Adventure Series had been missing the tone that those games set. Now, with Sonic X Shadow: Generations being released soon with the heavily anticipated third Sonic movie later, millennials seem quite hopeful for the future of the franchise because those more dramatic and serious themes that drew them into the new lore may return along with the characters that harnessed them, but that remains to be seen. At least the next generation of Sonic fans can experience some sense of what made Sonic great for their parents.
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