The year was 1990 and Nintendo was king of the world. It had a platform, the NES, firmly entrenched in 25 percent of all U.S. homes. It had yearly gross sales in the billions, and usurped Toyota as Japan's most successful company. It released Super Mario 3, the best selling video game ever, which grossed more than $500 million in America alone. (By entertainment industry standards, this was second only to the revenue generated by the movie E.T.). Nintendo was unstoppable.

Just for a moment, try to put yourself in the shoes of Hayao Nakayama, then president of Sega. Nintendo's NES had essentially just trounced the Sega Master System console in every territory except Europe (where Nintendo has never been strong) and, for some reason, Brazil. Nakayama knew that his only chance was to release the next generation Sega Genesis as early as possible before Nintendo came along with its Super Nintendo. Counting on Sega's dominance in the arcade market, the Genesis was essentially a scaled-down version of its arcade hardware, making it easy for Sega to port several of its classics there.

One of Oshima's original character designs

He got exactly that.

The challenge was answered by Sega's AM8 division (later renamed Sonic Team --- aha!). A 15-man group, AM8 spent several months toying with many character submissions from within the company (just about every animal, from rabbits to kangaroos, was being considered -- one Sega of America exec was hell-bent on it being a squirrel, largely based on his affinity for Rocky & Bullwinkle). The original game concept was to have a speedy character that could pick up and throw objects at enemies, but the mechanism of picking up objects proved too complicated and was dropped in favor of a character who simply rolled and plowed through his enemies. But a rolling ball didn't seem quite lethal enough, so the concept of spikes was introduced. This narrowed the potential animal candidates to two: an armadillo or a hedgehog. The hedgehog ultimately won and a character, code named "Mr. Needlemouse," was born.

Swift Success

The stars were aligned for Sega with the creation of Sonic the Hedgehog, and the first example of this was the perfect amalgamation of talent from three then-unknown game industry superstars -- the original Sonic team, so to speak. First, there was Naoto Oshima, a character designer whose fertile imagination produced all of the original creatures and artistic worlds in the game. Oshima later went on to design characters for subsequent Sonic games and the brilliant NiGHTS into Dreams.

Made to appeal to the American audience, perhaps?

He also directed Sonic CD and most recently started up the game development studio Artoon (known for Pinobee and Blinx). Second was Hirokazu Yasuhara, the original game and level designer, essentially responsible for how the entire game felt and played. Yasuhara worked on a majority of subsequent Sonic titles and was later hired on at Naughty Dog to work on the Jak & Daxter series. And third was Yuji Naka, a hotshot programmer fresh off of Phantasy Star I and II, who almost single-handedly programmed the game -- including many of the complicated physics effects. Naka, who nearly didn't join Sega (Namco ultimately refused to hire him because he didn't have a college degree), now heads up Sonic Team, the Sega studio continually responsible for a good portion of the company's hits.

In compliance with Nakayama's request to create a title that would demonstrate the strengths of Sega's Genesis hardware, the three focused on the one aspect that both Nintendo's NES and future Super NES wouldn't be able to match: speed. The Genesis had a CPU that ran at 7.6 MHz, while the Super Nintendo only ran at 3.58 MHz, and this difference became the game's central focus -- hence the main character's name. Sonic could run faster than any other game character before him. And unlike prior platform games, Sonic's levels were strategically designed to force the player to progress quickly with springs, slopes, loop de loops, and more. Sonic was fast and Sonic was cool.

Pressing the Attack

Sega of America realized it had to capitalize on this. When it came time to release Sonic the Hedgehog on June 23rd 1991, Nintendo's new Super Nintendo was already in stores and generating a significant amount of buzz thanks to Super Mario World. SOA knew that it had to take Nintendo on directly, and strike right at its heart. While the company had previously had some success with its "Sega Does What Nintendon't" ad campaign, now that Nintendo also had a 16-bit console in the market this was no longer relevant.

This guy looks oddly familiar...

Sega found a new answer in Sonic -- a character that could finally expose Nintendo's Mario as the chubby, slow plumber that he really was.

Nakayama couldn't understand it, as an article in Wired magazine years later revealed. His newly hired Sega of America president Tom Kalinske wanted to launch a campaign that directly compared his console to that of his rival, a concept virtually unthinkable in Japan. Kalinske argued that Sega's only chance in the states was to come out swinging, to which Nakayama delivered his decision. "It's your call," he told Kalinske. "That's why I hired you. Do whatever you think is right."

Accompanying the launch of Sonic, Sega of America began a barrage of ads targeted directly at Nintendo. The theme? Speed. Sega's ads depicted the Super Nintendo as slow and clunky and the Genesis as speedy and cool. One showed a Sega Genesis attached to an F1 racing car, while the Super Nintendo was tied to the back of a broken-down ice cream truck. Sega made the point that Sonic was only possible on the Genesis, a claim that would be debated in schoolyards for years to come but was nonetheless powerful in swaying popular opinion. To say that the campaign worked would be an understatement.

This could make a fun game, don't you think?

Sega's Genesis immediately became the cool system to own, and sales reflected this. Within no time Sonic supplanted Altered Beast as the pack-in game for the Genesis and immediately more than doubled the installed base.

Because of its success with the campaign, subsequent advertisement from Sega in years to come all played off the speed motif. By the time Sonic 2 came around, Sega had come up with the buzzword for another bit of technology that the Genesis used to speed up its games: Blast Processing. Technically, it was to describe the way the Genesis could display one image while loading another into memory -- something the SNES couldn't do -- but few knew that. All that was known was that Sega had it and Nintendo didn't. Even the familiar "Sega!" scream came from describing the speed of Sega's games.

Sonic single handedly turned the course of the 16-bit console wars. Sega became the dominant player for several years following -- likely surprising no one more than Nintendo's then-president Hiroshi Yamauchi who, perhaps as a result of arrogance, was late to respond to Sega's head start in the market. Sega saw gross sales rise from $813 million in 1989 to $3.6 billion in 1993. Sonic went on to see several more sequels and made the crossover into comic books, cartoon series, Happy Meals, and had branded products for just about anything else bought by children.

"Incoming!!!"

Never mind the goal of having what Mickey Mouse was to Disney, by 1992 Sonic was more recognizable among the 6-11 demographic than Mickey himself. In 1993, he was the first (and last) video game character to make an appearance at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, in the form of a 65-foot balloon which famously knocked down a lamppost and injured two people.

If there is any downside to this whole story (aside from the two people getting injured at a parade), it's that Naka, Yasuhara, and Oshima weren't given proper reward for creating Sonic, the game and character that generated millions in revenue and put Sega on track to become the industry giant it is today (or was a few years ago, at least). Naka publicly disagreed with Sega's seniority-based pay policy and quit the company over it. In fact, it wasn't until a man by the name of Mark Cerny lured him to Sega of America with the promise of substantial royalty rewards that he rejoined the company. Well, that and the keys to a shiny new Ferrari -- which gave Naka, a car enthusiast, little choice. By pure coincidence, Yasuhara had separately also decided to work at SOA in a program Cerny had established whereby experienced Japanese designers would come over and teach tricks of the trade to newer employees. With the two former Sonic Team members working together again, Cerny was able to continue the Sonic the Hedgehog series in the states. Sonic Team now employs over 100 staff members in offices in both American and Japan. Naka is the only one of the original 15 members still at the Sega division and to this day still drives his Ferrari.

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Sonic the Hedgehog

Landmarks:

• Helped Sega claim victory in the 16-bit console war
• Demonstrated the power of strong marketing
• Inspired a whole generation of furry mascots
• Established true speed in games
• "Sega!"

• Bubsy Bobcat
• Aero the Acrobat
• Every friggin' other second-rate platformer starring a fuzzy hero (with attitude)

Wired Magazine

Green Hill Zone

Musings:

"True story: I never owned a Nintendo Entertainment System. I do now, of course, but I never owned one when I was younger -- when every other gamer in the world had one. You see, I was one of those kids that grew up with parents who believed videogames were a 'waste of time,' would 'rot your brain,' and could 'never get you anywhere in life' (oh, the irony). No, all of my NES gaming was relegated to time spent at friends' houses (and because of that, this was a good deal of time). It wasn't until the early '90s that I was able to finally wear down my folks into allowing me to get a console of my own -- but I didn't get an NES. To their credit, my parents strongly suggested I go for the most powerful system on the market, which at that time was the newly-introduced Sega Genesis. It had Golden Axe, which I had lost plenty of quarters to at the local Pizza Hut, and it had great 16-bit visuals, so I went ahead and spent the extra dough on the Sega console.

"Which was great, except I still found myself visiting my friends' houses to play NES.

"Early Genesis games like Alex Kidd and Altered Beast were fun, but they weren't the Contras, Castlevanias, Metroids, Zeldas, Mega Mans, or any of the other really strong franchises we all came to love on the NES. Regardless of their visual inferiority, those games -- and the NES -- were simply still cooler to play.

"Then came Sonic. I picked up the game when it first came out, partly because of my own need for a new game; partly because of Sega's promotion for it. I was immediately hooked. Sonic had truly next-generation visuals, sound, and the gameplay was brilliantly addictive. There was something uniquely fresh about blazing through levels -- yet at the same time feeling like you still had control over the action. I also loved the element of exploring the open levels and seeking out every small secret. The game just really rocked. It was a true testament to what the Genny could do, and finally a title that made the system feel cool to own.

"Not surprisingly, that's when all of my NES-owning friends started asking to come over to my house to play."

Article by
Sam Kennedy