RUNNING RINGS

He’s been dashing through video games for almost 25 years and is finally ready to make his big screen debut this month with his own movie! Time to catch up with SONIC THE HEDGEHOG…

- Laura Griffiths

When Japanese company Sega launched an internal competition to create a new mascot for its fledgeling Mega Drive console, there were several concepts put on the table: a hedgehog, an armadillo, a porcupine, a dog, and an old guy with a moustache. How different things could have been if the company had opted to put a porcupine up against the enduringly popular plumber, Mario.

The year was 1991, and the video games industry was in the throes of its first console war as Nintendo dominated the market with its Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega had taken its first leap into the 16-bit home console era. The Mega Drive, known as the Genesis in North America, needed a hook, a flagship character who could go head to head against Mario and appeal to western audiences.

It was a shift in marketing for the company, which had previously found success in the 1980s with Super Scaler arcade games, to more character-focused branding led by Al Nilsen, former director of marketing at Sega of America. The brief, according to a panel with Sonic’s creators Naoto Oshima and Hirokazu Yasuhara at last year’s Game Developers Conference, was for something ‘spiky’ and cool. Sega’s internal AM8 team (which later became known as Sonic Team, headed up by programmer Yuji Naka, who created Sonic’s unique algorithm) set out to design a new hero and came up with the idea of a hedgehog who could curl up into a ball and whizz around at super-fast speeds in a side-scrolling 2D platformer. On a trip to New York, Oshima apparently put several concepts to the test on storyboards shown to passers-by in Central Park; the hedgehog, with its universal appeal, came out on top.