The colors whir and flash, the lights are bright, and the noises are fun. The Casino Night Zone is perhaps the game’s most inspiring example of this, sticking Sonic and Tails into a series of pinball and slot machine-inspired contraptions, with Sonic acting at times more like a ball than a hedgehog. Sonic 2 has elements like this, as is the case with any side-scrolling game, but it incorporates a more diverse set of gamified experiences to great effect. That core formula rarely, if ever, changes. Keep running through an aquatic zone, for example, and Sonic will eventually lose all his rings by running into some enemy that bursts through a brick wall or suddenly hits an underwater area where movement is much slower.Ģ-D Mario games are about timing and patience, lining up jumps just right, and memorizing the cadence. Even the pleasant rushing sounds as he gets faster incentive speed over all else. Sonic obviously wants to go fast, and the game encourages this in spades. Sonic 2 is a game that both rewards and punishes speed. “Once you get good and memorize the levels, you can just hold down the B button and run through the stage. is a wonderful game, but if you play it every day, you always have to start from stage 1-1, right?” Naka said. And they start looking at what Mario games did, and what they did not do. Then, the team wanted to use an animal that could roll up in a ball, like a hedgehog. “I tried to object, saying, ‘Actually, I wrote them in order of which ones I want to do…’ but he didn’t listen to me at all,” Naka admitted.Īt first, the character was a rabbit. He wanted to make a racing game or a puzzle game, but, as Naka said in a 2001 interview, “the one that caught his attention was the very last entry on the list, which said, ‘an action game to challenge Mario.’” Yuji Naka, a Sega programmer who had worked on the Phantasy Star series, wrote a memo to his boss with a list of games he wanted to work on. Sega, the once-American and now-Japanese company that had previously focused on arcade games, wanted to face Nintendo in living rooms with a console of their own.

A poll of American children in 1990 showed that Mario was more popular than even the venerable Mickey Mouse. Nintendo had a mascot in the form of a colorful and mustachioed Italian plumber, after all. If a company wanted its video game console to succeed in the 1990s, especially a non-Nintendo console, it needed a mascot.

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