9. Due to the massive success of Sonic, what lessons did other game studios learn from the games? What do they think made Sonic so popular?
Partial transcript of a Youtube video titled "Sonic Is The Best Thing That's Happened To Video Games (And Not For The Reasons You Think)"
[...]So here's my thesis statement I'll be proving for the next... however long this video ends up being: the way so many video games these days are full of "lore" [
the presenter makes air quotes while saying "lore"], the fact that the average time to beat most big releases has plateaued around twenty to twenty-five hours ever since the mid-2000s aside from RPGs, the way games with levels so often grade your performance for each level, the sheer number of characters that are gay, trans, and/or ethnic minorities? All direct results of companies trying to copy the success of Sonic the Hedgehog.
That last one's pretty obvious, we all know about
Sonic High School and how that game made a million middle-aged women have their furry awakening, and a billion kids had gay or trans awakenings from that game too. Take a video game studies class at any college, you'll hear all about
Sonic High School and what it did to the culture of every country that had a Sega fanbase worth talking about in 2006. And you all don't watch my videos to hear me tell you what you already know, so I'll skip over proving how that... phenomenon started filling games with gay furry characters. The "ethnic minority" part is the one I bet you all weren't expecting. So where's that come from?
Well, your gal's always liked reading video game developer interviews when she gets the chance. I even learned Japanese so I could read more of them. And boy oh boy do video game magazines in Japan like interviewing the people who make Sonic games. Obviously there's plenty of interviews with Oda, Seno, Yoko, Tanaka, Maekawa, all the people we think of as having strong creative visions that turn into games getting made. And Iizuka, who keeps the whole show from going off the rails. But there's plenty of interviews with lesser known names who also contribute to the series. Side note, one of them, Hana Kotsuji, the writer for
Team Emerald and the Sticks games, she has some absolutely bonkers interviews. Great reading if you like that kind of thing. Anyway, pretty much everybody from Sonic Team who gets interviewed says that they get lots of inspiration from stuff outside of Japanese culture. Normal enough, but they say it almost
every time. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Sonic Team hardly ever takes direct inspiration from Japanese culture. And Iizuka's said plenty of times that he doesn't think Sonic stories would be what they are if he hadn't been willing to listen to ideas that employees of Sega's Western branches had back in the 90s. Never mind the fact that Naoto Oshima, the man who created the character of Sonic in the first place, took inspiration almost entirely from American media. Even without reading the Sonic Team interviews that are only in Japanese, it's not hard to see that a lot of the ethos, the vibes, whatever you wanna call it, of Sonic comes from how Sonic Team puts their own, Japanese-flavored spin on things from Western culture.
What that means is that some game developers who want to make a game big enough everyone starts changing their release schedules to not compete with you, they'll try to get the same lightning in a bottle by blending different cultures together. And with how famous Sonic Team is for their willingness to go damn near anywhere if it'll help them get the look and sound of a place just right, it's no surprise that other teams trying to do culture blending in their games will often get someone from any cultures they want to draw from to help out. And from there, it's not much of a leap to just start putting in characters who are supposed to be members of those cultures too, and with how many game developers are American, European, or Japanese, well... the cultures they find interesting tend to be ones that they know about but don't have much face-to-face experience with, and that means ethnic minorities.
[...]
And I think we can all guess how Sonic made performance grading and "lore" [
the presenter makes air quotes again] popular. Story-heavy games that do big and they usually grade how well you do at them too. Of course some devs are gonna look at that and imitate it, whether or not they understand why Sonic Team does it with their games. But let's talk about the thing that I think is really interesting. The time needed to beat big marquee releases plateauing. Aside from RPGs, of course. I think Square won't be satisfied til they make a game that takes two hundred hours to beat and every single character has textures so detailed you can count their individual pores.
Anyway, I know that some of you all watching don't have much experience with what games were like in the 80s and 90s, so I'll give you a brief rundown. Back in the 80s, it was
really common for a game to take like an hour to beat, tops. Most of the time spent playing a game was just learning that game's particular flavor of bullshit so you could get past everything it threw at you. But once you have it all learned, going from start to finish in an 80s game just doesn't take that long unless it's a genre that's designed to take a while, like RPGs. It keeps coming back! And the situation didn't change much in the first half of the 90s, but once the 3D consoles started coming out, well, the amount of data a CD could store was a massive game-changer. The biggest Super Nintendo or Genesis game was maybe four megabytes. A CD can hold
six hundred megabytes. That's a hundred and fifty times as much data! Devs wanted to
use all that storage space, of course, and they did. Games started getting a lot longer to beat because the developers could put more game in the package. You can even see it with Sonic. The first few Sonic games take like an hour at most to beat even for a casual player, but
Aether needs at least three hours to beat even when you know what you're doing. The speedrun record's still not under an hour and a half, as I recall. So games started getting longer because they
could get longer. And then with the Dreamcast, PS2, Gamecube era? Then we had DVDs, and they held
even more data. You can see where I'm going with this.
But then of course we have to ask why didn't Blu-Rays lead to a ton of games that take, like, fifty hours to beat? Well, some companies tried that, but it turns out actually making fifty hours' worth of game costs a lot of money. Sonic games don't do well just because everyone and their mom buys them. Sonic games are actually pretty cheap to make for how high-profile the series is, and they get made
really quickly too. Some of that's because Sonic Team hardly ever loses people, so it's full of experts in game development, but a lot of it is because Sonic games are pretty small in scope, for the most part. Even nowadays, the only Sonic games I'd expect anyone to need much more than ten hours to beat would be games like
Resistance or
Cyber Crisis where they're slow enough they just can't be beaten quickly. And that's one of the things that I think a lot of game developers think helps Sonic do so well. Even aside from it just being easier for Sonic games to turn a profit because they're cheaper, being smaller means you can replay them more often, and that helps you get attached to the games. So other companies that want their big series to do well, they want players to get attached to those series, so they want games that can be replayed a lot, which means shorter games. They also want
a lot of games, since that's another thing Sonic does that helps Sega make all the money. There's always a new Sonic game just on the way, so the blue dude's always on your mind. If other companies want to put out lots of games, those games need to be small enough to finish in just a year or two like Sonic Team always manages somehow. And that all leads to shorter games.
But game developers need something to set themselves apart from Sega or they can't sell. And Sega's still got a lot of that arcade ethos in their games, which means
very short and
very replayable. A game that's twenty-five hours isn't nearly as replayable as
Synthetic Invasion, but it has the one things Sonic games don't generally offer, a
big experience. You couldn't do
Final Fantasy VII in any less time than Square did. It takes like thirty hours to beat that game, and the story's going as fast as it can without turning the whole thing into incomprehensible mush. Sonic doesn't really do RPGs for a reason. A series that's all about replaying the same levels over and over to get better at them just doesn't fit the "stop and smell the roses" mindset even a blisteringly fast RPG like
FFVII needs. Even so, most game genres
don't need to be that slow, and Sonic's done them just fine. And sold like crazy, naturally, so pretty much every genre that can go fast without sucking has given itself a soft cap of twenty-five hours to beat the game. Which is great for us consumers, since it's also keeping game prices down. You just can't get people to pay more than fifty dollars for a game that's twenty-five hours long. Though it does make Square even more of the "premium" game company since they
do make long games and
do charge out the ass for them. Is my vendetta against Square obvious?
[...]
So, overall, I think Sonic's done a lot of good for games. Sure, we don't get a whole lot of really big games you can just lose all your time to outside of randomly generated games like
Minecraft, but I'm not sure we
need a lot of those either. And I'm sure making games full of different kinds of people who are portrayed reasonably non-stereotypically is doing a lot of good in the world, to say nothing of the whole "legalizing gay marriage in the US and Japan" thing. And to think we owe it all to a cartoon blue rat with a cocaine problem. What a world we live in.
