He's Blue (da ba dee): Sonic 1, Act-by-Act

Welcome! This is the first post for the Sonic 1 anatomy. It's an important game, and in this post I explain a lot of why I think looking at its design is important, but if you want to just read about each level, here's a handy table of contents for you:

• Introduction (this post)
• Green Hill Zone Act 1
• Secret Zone 1
• Green Hill Zone Act 2
• Green Hill Zone Act 3
• Secret Zone 2
• Marble Zone Act 1
• Marble Zone Act 2
• Marble Zone Act 3
• Secret Zone 3
• Spring Yard Act 1
• Spring Yard Act 2
• Spring Yard Act 3
• Secret Zone 4
• Labyrinth Zone Act 1, split in two parts
  

Introduction: So Why Sonic Anyway?


If you look at a lot of the games that have gotten anatomy coverage, they've tended to be games that are pretty linear. Megaman, Mario, Kid Icarus, the Castlevanias, the Donkey Kongs? All of them have levels that pretty much only have one main route through them, with alternate routes usually being level skips or hidden bonus areas. That's fair -- they lend themselves well to a screen-by-screen analysis since you usually can't divert from the path that the level designers intended. Not by much, at least.

Certainly that's less true for Zelda and Metroid, but especially in Metroid's case not only does there appear to be an intended sequence, but a lot of the alternate routes you can take are dead ends or traps that sometimes lead to extra power-ups. Specific power-ups and abilities are needed to progress through the game though, so there's still a mostly-canonical sequence to them even if it's more obscure.

What makes Sonic interesting to me as a franchise is that it usually doesn't have a single canonical route through a level, except maybe for the idea of speedrunning. Most levels branch out in multiple routes, usually converging on a single point at the end of each level, and with only a few kinda-obscure counterexamples you are almost always moving to the right to get to the end of a level. It's possible to get stuck in some places but you're almost never able to get lost -- heading up and right will usually get you closer to where you want to be if there's more than one apparent route.

Generally when I see PC platforming games contemporary to Sonic (and before it came out as well), they treat their levels a little more like dungeons. There's an exit somewhere, but often there are lots of trinkets/keys to collect or several dead-ends within the layout. Jill of the Jungle is such a game, and while it has larger, more elaborate levels than what you might see in Mario at the time, it also is much, much more labyrinthine. That's not to mean bad, but certainly a different idea from what Sonic goes for.

Having said that, I think one of the reasons Sonic is pretty popular in a lot of the world (and not just in the US where it was sold as the thing that defined the 1990s to its children) is because it seems to derive some of its ideas from these labyrinthine levels. It packages them up in a way that makes them more digestible to someone accustomed to platformers on console games, because of this inability to get lost. Instead, it gives players a way to return to levels they've played and try to explore them in different ways. It's a nice strategy to making the game a little more immediately replayable without getting overly dull. Since Sonic has only a little over half as many levels as the first Mario (which, admittedly, also repeated layouts in a few places) it's one of the ways the game maintains its freshness.

At the very least, Sonic was pretty influential for game developers on platforms like the Amiga. Many games pushed for Sonic-like fast movement but still mixed the sort of nonlinear design common in computer games at the time with it. It tends not to work as well, and usually those games aren't as well regarded. Zool is an excellent example of this: in order to reach the end of a level, you have to collect something like 100 candy-items and then reach a goal.

Now despite the fact that the first Sonic game was very clearly trying to branch away from the design of platformers like Mario, you can still see a large amount of influence from the design of games like it as it goes on, and especially compared to the later Sonic games. If any of the Sonics will work well as an Anatomy-style series, it's going to be the first one. (Trust me, you'll see.) I figure this sort of mish-mash of styles comes from the developers trying to gradually introduce the mechanics that would go on to make Sonic what it is, being a little conservative with techniques here and there to make at least some of the levels appealing even if not all of their ideas work at once. In that sense it's a very exploratory game.

On the other hand it's that sort of conservatism that gives us Marble Zone, and I'm one of like 3 people I know who actually like that stage, so eh.

Ultimately Sonic 1 represents a significant turning point in game design, really marking the shift away from game styles common in the NES era and pushing toward something that was maybe a little less well-tuned but also a little friendlier and more forgiving. It was, and arguably still is, a very culturally important game.

Next time: GHZ1

This promises to be an interesting read.

(Though, you can't edit your thread title, so you kinda screwed yourself there by putting "[Newest Post: Intro]" in it. Oh well.)

I've said so before plenty I'm sure, but I'm always surprised nobody else ever seems to get behind me on citing Psycho Fox as massive influence on the Sonic games. Animal mascot character, crazy amounts of inertia in the movement physics, the whole high road/low road take on branching paths through any given level... but nobody's ever willing to give it the time of day.

I guess I can see it, maybe? But we're talking cave paintings against the Sistine Chapel ceiling here.

Edit: Blinkpen did a proto version of this a while back. Looking forward to reading this! I'd suggest PMing a mod and asking them to change your thread title to remove the "Latest Post" thing, since you can't change it. Like someone already pointed out, making this (and me) completely redundant.

I think you make some very interesting points, including about the PC platformers in the earlier paragraph I didn't quote. I could quote it. I could go back and do it right now. But I won't. Stubborn, bloody-minded me. Oh well.

I had never thought of the Apogee/Epic games in relation to Sonic before, with the exception of the original Jazz Jackrabbit which is a psychotic mishmash of Sonic, Mario and Megaman; though his pounding feet and ludicrous speed call the blue hedgehog to mind instantly.

I also think Sonic succeeded and got his way into the public consciousness as not just an alternative to Mario aesthetically, but it's almost the opposite of Mario to play, too. The whole "drop your rings" system is a stroke of genius; it makes the game extremely easy to play, extremely forgiving of mistakes. Sonic isn't necessarily a joke difficulty-wise, but compared with Mario it's breezy and pacey. Which is good!

Superfrog too! You need to collect 45 coins to exit. The issue with games like Zool and Superfrog is that there's no accumulation of speed; you press right and you're immediately going like the clappers. There's also Superfrog's flying cape, Zool's throwing gumballs, wall climbing etc. All of these muddy the water; another reason Sonic is so successful is that literally anyone can play it. It's no surprise Sonic was the first game I ever played (Master System, but same principle). You move and jump, that's it. Every button does the same thing! When you're in a ball, you're effectively invincible. It's so, so easy to learn to play. Mastering it comes from rolling, understanding the game's physics and momentum. It's enduring. Very, very enduring.

Who doesn't like the Marble Zone!? Bare-knuckle fight, multi-storey car park, burning bin, circle of blokes. Now.

I could drone the fuck on about the Sonic games endlessly. So I probably will. Cheers.

Never thought of it before, but this seems exactly right. Open level platformers have mostly remained obscure over here while they made up a good bulk of UK microcomputer games. Reconfiguring the open level into a series of linear obstacle courses gives it the polish* of a early console game but maintains the appeal the open level games had overseas. Even crazier is that I bet it was an entirely unintentional decision that's helped maintain Sonic's popularity globally. Good stuff. Really looking forward to this series.

*Yes I am bias toward console/US games, at least ones from the 80s and 90s. And no, it's not nostalgia - I didn't play the European games on the original hardware, but I certainly played a bunch of PC/console ports of them growing up.

Excellent intro post, really looking forward to this.

OK then, it's been long enough. Let's start getting to some actual level discussion.

Part 1: Green Hill Zone Act 1, or, Bill O'Reilly's Nightmare



Our first view of GHZ is in the background of the Title Screen. While the background scrolls, Sonic pops out, acting in a way that mixes "smug" with "vaguely cute".

Which is hardly unique to Sonic. Despite supposedly launching an entire era's worth of overly cool characters, his roots are more in Felix the Cat and the Pink Panther aesthetically. Somewhere between smug and goofy, between elegant and absurd, lies Sonic. You will not see a skateboard in this game. You will not see sunglasses. You will not see any backwards baseball caps.

I've seen a few places calling Sonic -- as a character -- a relic of 90s, which is partly true, since Sega really did try to phase him out during the Saturn years the same way they phased out Alex Kidd after the Master System. Where I take exception is when people trot out comparisons to The Simpsons' obnoxiously cool joke character Poochie. Poochie's point as a character was that he was designed by committee. Sonic wasn't so much, mostly being designed by one guy at Sega, the underappreciated Naoto Ohshima, who would go on to be the lead designer for Sonic CD and later worked on such forgotten games as Blinx: The Time Sweeper. Really, the "cool mascot cartoon character" had been in vogue for at LEAST as long as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon series, which started in 1987 and thus predates Sonic by several years. Cowabunga, dudes!

If anything, Sonic cleverly draws a line between late 80s / early 90s American cartoons and the styles of the 50s and 60s with Felix and Pink Panther. If I told you about a "smug anthropomorphic animal who uses quick wits to defeat his evil scientist nemesis", well, I'd be as likely describing the old 50s Felix cartoon show, with his Magical Bag of Tricks.



Color him blue, then add some spikes, and presto! It's Kirby Sonic! ORIGINAL FAN CHARACTER DO NOT STEAL.

Of course, Felix actually predates the 50s by a few decades, having been in several silent-era black and white cartoons before this. Level art in Sonic tends to base itself on styles common to posters from the 1920s, so it's a 1920s character in a 1920s poster world. It works really well, visually.

Keep in mind that all of this is talking from the perspective of this game and the rest of the series in the 90s. Discussing the comics and cartoons is something different entirely, and way out of the scope of an anatomy post, since those seem to be much more responsible for how Sonic is remembered than the actual games, which lacked much direct characterization.

You may also notice that you don't see "PRESS START BUTTON" in your copy of the game. That text is actually hiding in your cartridge, but never showed up due to an error in the way ram is freed up before the title screen start. Changing a few lines of code in the game to make sure some RAM filled in from the two screens before it -- the classic SEGA screen and the SONIC TEAM PRESENTS one following it -- gets properly deleted causes it to show up. The screen doesn't quite look right without it (too much empty space), so I went ahead and changed that. Otherwise the game is indistinguishable from the Japanese version of the game, which came out a little later and has a few extra graphical effects in the backgrounds of most levels.

Anyway, now to the level itself.

The best map of GHZ 1 is probably found at Zone 0, so you should go there if you want to get a better idea of how the stage all fits together.



It starts out with an open screen, where the only direction to move is right. As I mentioned a bit in the introduction it's nearly impossible to get lost in this game since you're almost always supposed to be heading to the right to get where you need to go.

You also have enough space here to understand how Sonic builds up his momentum. Sonic doesn't have a run button, so giving him about a screen's distance before anything happens lets the player discover this fairly safely, and by the time Sonic goes past the part of the level shown in that first screen, he's right about at his standard top speed.



After a bit you come to the first three rings in the stage. You'd have to jump to get them. The rings rotate in a way similar to how coins do in Mario games, a decent shorthand for the fact that they too are a helpful collectible item. They are otherwise stationary, though, so it's not hard to tell they don't represent a threat to Sonic.



However, right past those rings is the first Motobug, here the Sonic equivalent of the first SMB 1-1 goomba. He is positioned in such a way that a player that has not yet learned to jump will have to in order to not die; touching him while running without having any rings causes Sonic to die. In the event that Sonic jumped through those rings, however, he only gets knocked back and scatters the rings around instead.

(It's good philosophy to kill off an inexperienced player as quickly as possible in a game with limited lives like this. The player doesn't lose too much progress to that mistake, and can easily reset and have a full life count to try again. Sonic doesn't perfectly hold to this philosophy, as we'll see later -- the first crushing death opportunities won't be for several stages -- but does a decent job here.)

The latter case of damage while holding rings is particularly interesting. As long as Sonic has at least one ring, he can't die from most damage. There are exceptions -- squashing, falling off the level, and drowning are immediate death situations for Sonic, even in newer games. But in the case of being knocked back like this, Sonic also will probably scatter a few rings in the direction he was hit, making them easy to recover. As long as Sonic has a few rings, it's easy to regain at least 2-3 in the event of getting hit. This is the first significant change from Mario, since Mario tended to teach the player new mechanics by having invincibility stars in stages where a new mechanic was introduced; since almost nothing is immediately fatal in Sonic it's a game that's much more friendly to new players, and makes it a little easier to make progress in unfamiliar levels. But it maintains a high skill ceiling by encouraging the player not to take too much damage -- I'll continue to go into detail on this in other posts, especially since the biggest example of this is in accessing the Special Zone, which deserves its own such post.



If you ignored the rings and jumped over the motobug, you'll find yourself approaching a bridge with a chomping fish, aptly named Chopper. He's timed so that if you want to keep moving forward you'll have to grab those rings by jumping over him. If you haven't yet grabbed any rings, the game makes it really hard for you to not do this, and then throws a few more rings at you on a downhill slope that curves upward. These are all nearly unmissable.



After that are two crab robots, Crabmeats, perched on narrow ledges. If you're still keeping a brisk pace as Sonic you might wind up hitting one from the side instead of from the top. This again differentiates Sonic from Mario -- Sonic is not forced to hit enemies from above in order to damage them successfully.

After the crabs, Sonic has to hop over a couple awkwardly-placed rocks and avoid another chopper bridge. Two bee-like buzzbombers pass overhead and fire a projectile but are easily avoided (they are generally a very passive hazard in this stage and mostly only exist as decoration or specifically to be destroyed). It is at this point the level finally begins to open up.



This is the first spring in Sonic. Springs allow Sonic to go much higher than he can by jumping, but leave him vulnerable to damage in the process as he isn't in his rolling state when hit by a spring.

This spring hints at the canonical route through the stage, moving up and to the right. You don't need to take the spring to reach it, as there is a collapsing platform that Sonic can reach easily if he is still moving right while jumping over that spring. In the event that he misses, though, he goes to an interesting lower section of the level, that introduces spikes.



The closer set of spikes is a bit to the left of that spring, past what is an uphill descent from that side of the level. These spikes surround another spring that takes Sonic back to where he was before he fell, and represent the first major technical challenge Sonic poses to players. Hitting the spring takes you back before you missed your previous jump, but this one is not so forgiving.



Overshooting the jump will lead Sonic into the spikes, and the knockback is just enough to hit the spikes on the other side of the spring. This is instant death as there is no mercy invincibility from spikes. In fact, spikes are so serious that there is a specific sound effect just for spike death. The lesson is clear: don't mess with spikes. Implicit -- spikes are far more common in lower levels.



Indeed, past that spike trap is another similar trap that's slightly less ornery due to the fact that you can jump over the whole thing and continue right. The spring isn't super important here and only gives Sonic access to a few more rings and may as well be avoided.



And then more spikes. These spikes are again placed so perniciously that hitting one will knock you fatally into one of the other sets. If it wasn't clear already, jumping over these lower-level pits is usually a better idea than falling into them if you can help it.



...Or is it? These lower routes tend to lead Sonic to a few extra rewards. In this case these monitors provide together 30 rings and temporary invincibility. Invincibility is a big deal in Sonic, since, again, it isn't generally used in the process of teaching the player new hazards; it's a sign that you can rock out at top speed for a little while and ignore hazards. Spikes, lava, and enemies all pose no threat while encircled by those stars.



This makes it rather odd that rejoining the canonical path here is nearly forced by yet another set of spikes; the temptation would be to run across the spikes, now harmless due to the invincibility, to see what else might be on the lower route. It turns out that nothing but death awaits Sonic past these spikes, as touching the bottom of the level is always fatal. As you can see here, though, the first set of spikes is slightly lower than the others to make running across all of them impossible. In fact, it's hard to land onto these spikes at all, and because of the lowering of the first spikes the game is trying very hard to get you to jump up to the top path. It's possible to land on or past the other spikes in this set, but very hard, requiring a very light tap of the jump button to do so. Basically. the game is doing about as much as it can to discourage trying to run past those spikes given your newfound sparkle powers.



Now, going back to where that first spring was, taking the upper path sends you across a few collapsing walkways, easy to identify due to looking vaguely like fingers, and not being a major hazard here as they drop Sonic to the lower level. Then you reach the point in the picture above, showing off the first lamppost, which serves as a checkpoint. A bad place for it, in my opinion, rather than before the spike pit, since the fact that it serves as a checkpoint isn't obvious until you die. Putting it on a route reachable only accessible from bypassing the most dangerous trap so far makes that lesson harder to learn. Nothing to the right of this checkpoint is as fatal as those spikes, so it seems more like a cruel joke than a useful object.

The checkpoint also is right by platforms leading away from what I consider to still be the canonical route through the level. The platforms move, and Sonic can take them up to a super ring.



From here are 3 platforms, stationary, that fall under Sonic's weight. They aren't distinguishable from the other platforms other than the fact that they don't move at all. There are some stationary platforms that support Sonic's weight, but in general don't expect most of them to be that way. No moving platforms collapse.



They lead to this shield, on top of the first loop of the game. You'll run through it on the canonical path, but here you simply go on top. Most loops in this level have power-ups like these. Shields work almost exactly like rings, in that Sonic loses a shield when he gets hit by something that would cause him to lose rings, but when the shield is gone it cannot be recovered. However, no rings are lost. It's not interesting based on anything we've seen so far in the stage, though it might have been handy for some of those spikes in the spike pit.

From here there are more platforms moving upward, leading to two branching paths.



The lower path has a series of rings and also has Sonic be tormented by a bunch of chameleon homing missiles, called Newtrons. At the end of this path is a tube that leads Sonic to the bottom of the stage. He runs past a few stationary projectile-firing newtrons, can grab a few more rings while running past a waterfall, has to hop some spikes, and then after hopping past another crabmeat reaches the level end.



Riding a few more platforms up and across takes Sonic to another series of rings, and then to a series of falling platforms.



Ultimately it leads you to this moving platform which hovers over a pile of rings. The canonical route through the level leads through a tube that shoots you up into those rings, below this platform. Since you can't grab most of the rings even from this higher vantage point, the extra time taken to get to this point (not to mention the technical skill expected of the player to do so, relative to it being the first stage of the game) makes it feel rather pointless.

I don't think the game expected you to take this route on your first play of the game at all, and if you're trying to push right you'll miss the first platforms that eventually lead you up here completely (the ones near that first checkpoint). Now, if you've played the Sonic 1 for Master System or Game Gear you realize that it had chaos emeralds out in the playing field rather than hidden away in special stages as became the established norm for Sonic (including this stage).

Sonic 1 here has 6 chaos emeralds, which so happens to be the same number of zones in the game. Sonic 1 for master system must have been based on early concepts and sketches for Sonic (and in particular, the later level Labyrinth on the Master System looks a lot like early screenshots of its Genesis brethren). It stands to reason that parts of levels were planned out to hold these emeralds.

This extended side-trip makes much more sense if you assume that this detour was supposed to lead to a chaos emerald. Otherwise it's a lot of work for basically no reward. I wouldn't spend so much time even bothering to talk about this except for the fact that I cannot find any justification for this detour.

It also would explain why the path with all the newtrons exists -- it looks like the "correct" 'path through the level but is designed to deter players from taking it -- it's just as hazardous without much reward otherwise. Neither of these routes establishes itself as valuable to the level design from an instruction standpoint, and neither offers a reward quite on the order of the 30 rings and invincibility from the spike pit detour.

Without the emerald they feel pointless, and given how much more satisfying the canonical route through the level is, are hard to defend. I'm surprised they were even kept if that was their original purpose, rather than removed in order to make the level more compact.

OKAY. So.



Back to this part of the level with the checkpoint again, we just keep moving to the right. Finally -- the route through the level that everyone actually takes!



After a small slope downward, we go around the loop instead. Loops are the first really momentum-based challenge we've seen so far: Sonic has to be going at a certain speed in order to get around them, as otherwise he will stall out and have to backtrack to regain that speed. Getting around them is easy if you give yourself enough space, since all you need to do is hold right.



Now it gets interesting. Though the newtron path above led to a tunnel, this route leads to a tunnel section that's effectively twice as long. Going through it forces Sonic into his rolling state, which alters his physics and controls but gives him (as you see when travelling through it) really high speed on some sloped surfaces.

You can also roll by pressing the down button. Later on, especially in the last few levels, rolling manually will be a really important part of gaining speed to reach certain routes and also to avoid some traps. While rolling, though, Sonic loses a lot of maneuverability in his jump, and is almost completely fixed at his current momentum. Sonic can't be stopped from rolling by going into a jump, even if you're holding the left button. However, he does uncurl from the roll when he lands, returning him to his normal control state.

You'll notice between the two tunnel sections that there is another checkpoint. This one is bullshit used to cover up a bug in the programming of the level -- if you roll through the pipes TOO quickly, the level can't keep up with you and you hit the bottom. If you look at the Zone 0 map, the stage gets taller and deeper as it goes on, and that changes dynamically. But reaching the bottom of the screen at any point where it changes counts to the game as death. Oops!

http://youtu.be/2kYHkMLyCp0 This is a video of me pulling off that exact bug. It's obnoxious. Dying here will restart you at the checkpoint you just passed. Probably the biggest weak point in this level is the use of these checkpoints.

From here you get launched across a ramp that leads you to the big collection of rings seen from the platform on the upper route. Odds are that in the process Sonic will plow through one of a few buzzbombers placed between the ramp and the rings. What's interesting is that he will do it from beneath, the first time the game forces a Mario player to understand that, yes, actually, you can hit enemies from any direction, as long as you're spinning/jumping.

After this is a recapitulation of what you saw before -- more buzzbombers, another chopper bridge, and another super ring power up on a platform just like near the start of the stage (in fact the level chunk is completely identical), with one last moving platform to the bottom of the stage.



So now we are at the end of the level, and there is the signpost, the universal indicator that the Sonic level is over, and in almost all cases a sign of having reached the rightmost part of the stage (the only notable exceptions coming to mind are the irritating Sonic 2 Master System / Game Gear and the labyrinthine Knuckles Chaotix, neither of which held too strongly to standard Sonic design ethos in general anyway). If you've preserved your momentum carefully on reaching this point, you can jump in certain places and hit point bonus markers that give you extra points.



In addition, collecting more than 50 rings provides access to the Special Stage, the place to pick up chaos emeralds and continues.

One of the reasons I call the route that goes through the loop 'canonical' is because of the way the point totals work in this game. Completing a level within 30 seconds gives 50,000 points, within 45 seconds gives 10,000, and within a minute gives 5,000. Lower times give other bonuses, but the important point is that unlike in many other games where time is a direct function of how many seconds are left in the level timer, here it's a gated function. Getting the full time bonus, a 'perfect score' in a sense, requires beating the level in under 30 seconds, which is feasible only from the route that goes through that loop -- waiting for the platforms simply takes too long. Points may only be for show, but the pride of a sub-30 second completion is still hard to pass on.

Thus experienced players will find that the upper routes are even less rewarding simply because of the fact that they get in the way of a speedy finish and offer no other rewards. The ring bonus gives 100 points per ring held at the end of the stage, but no level has anywhere near the 500 rings necessary to make hardcore ring collecting a worthwhile alternative to speedy finishes. (Sonic 2 changed this -- collecting all the rings in stage and holding onto them nets a special 'perfect' bonus worth that same 50,000 points. Not only is that good enough for an extra life, but finishing a level with more than 10,000 points in Sonic 2 nets you a continue. It's just borderline impossible to do, though.)

Anyway, that's Act 1 of Green Hill Zone. It's got a lot to show off in a relatively short amount of time and space, and certainly sets the tone for a lot of what to expect in the future. And for a first level, there are some places where it really doesn't fuck around. Mostly a really good one, minus that stupid bug in the pipes, and the rather useless alternate paths.

That was awesome. Keep it up!

Hotcha. The wait was worth it.

I should note that if you have the recent 3DS or android/ios ports of the game then the issue with dying at the end of the tunnel is fixed; the screen scrolling is no longer fatal to sonic and you can thus go a little faster through that part of the stage. As a result, I always have spin dash turned on in the 3DS version, though actually using the spin dash in Sonic 1 feels like reading the sparknotes version of a Shakespeare play

Death by getting bounced from spikes onto other spikes only happens in the earliest versions of the game. It was considered a bug and fixed in cartridge revisions.

I did not know this! Huh!

I might have imagined this, but in Mega Collection, I think there's some kind of button combination you can push to play the various revisions of Sonic 1.

The only versions of the game where they changed this were actually in Sonic Mega Collection (where the Sonic 1 rom was effectively hacked to do this) and I think Sonic Jam (which was built as a port since the Saturn had no hope of efficient Genesis emulation). The behavior was also only changed in Sonic 2 partway through development. No cartridge release of Sonic 1 acts like that; they all have fatal spikes. Considering that in a lot of contemporary games to Sonic, spikes are instant death, it seems like its intended behavior. Especially since, again, spike death is its own special sound effect.

http://info.sonicretro.org/Spike_damage_behavior

EDIT: Another thing I should probably point out (and have now edited into the article itself), is that most spikes in the pit are positioned in such a way that your knockback will land Sonic on one of the other sets of spikes almost every time. If they wanted there to be mercy invincibility between spikes, they probably would have spaced them out a little farther; the placement of the spikes makes it clear that this was intended behavior or a bug that the developers wanted to keep in. An example of a similar bug/oversight that became a feature was Sonic 3's final boss, which damages even the otherwise invulnerable Super Sonic; from the way it's coded, it looks a bit like a bug that was left in because, hey, why not make the final boss a little harder than everything else?

I hope this series expands to Sonic 2 and 3&K as well.

I might! But both those games tend to have a lot more elaborate layouts. By the time I get to Star Light and Scrap Brain I'll see how much work I end up putting in (both of those levels have pretty elaborate layouts) and if it's not too bad I might keep going. I think that if I do more, I'd actually go with Sonic CD first. It may have gigantic levels, but out of all the games probably plays closest to this game so it makes a natural jumping-off point. Either that or maybe the Master System version of the game.


***

Oh, and y'all know how in that post I mentioned a bit about discussing the details of Sonic as a character was out of scope for this anatomy series? Well, almost as if on cue, earlier today Zolani Stewart (@fengxii on twitter, cool guy, worth following) posted an article on Sonic as a character that's pretty in-depth. Absolutely recommended, and probably the first time that a games tabloid has written about Sonic where the focus isn't about his penis.

http://kotaku.com/a-look-inside-the-...hog-1615891789

Actually, I wouldn't mind seeing Sonic CD next, since I've never been able to get into that game despite liking all the other Sonic games of that era. Maybe seeing the levels broken down would show me why people seem to love that game so much.

Anyway, this is really good so far. Keep it up!

Great start! I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes.

Part 2: Secret Zone 1, Or, The Post In Which I Explain Why Sonic Was So Popular

Turn around
Turn around
There's a thing there that can be found
-- John Linnell, from Turn Around (Apollo 18)

As always, a high-level view is available at the wonderful Zone0. [png]



The secret zone sees Sonic in something along the lines of Cameltry. Sonic's jumping has been significantly nerfed, and now all jumps he makes have great height; there is no tapping here. Most of the control for Sonic needs to be done with using only left and right to control him, because jumps can fling Sonic directly into hazards' way for the careless player. Even I can sometimes have trouble with these stages because of the way the jump works. There's an element of fortune to these stages not seen in the rest of the game, almost like a roulette wheel or The Price Is Right's Plinko board: physics that you have some rough control over but are still mostly at the mercy of.

Most of the stage's layout is of blocks and wheels that work no different from platforms, though due to the rotation can only provide a perch for Sonic for a short time before he rolls off. Along with these, there are a few other blocks that mostly serve as annoyances and obstacles: bumper blocks, denoted with a star in their center, which bounce Sonic away when he hits them and can sometimes be used to knock Sonic away from more perilous parts of the stage; speed control blocks, marked with "up" and "down" which change the rotation of the stage with each touch (and eventually changing an up"block to down and vice-versa), where hitting a few up blocks can make the stage incredibly difficult to navigate; and reverse blocks which reverse the rotation of the special stage and can lead to Sonic winding up going in exactly the opposite direction of where he should go.

There are also the terribly-mislabeled GOAL spheres, which kick Sonic from the secret zone on contact. They represent the only true hazard in the secret zone, and as there are no damaging obstacles or time limits in it, without them Sonic would be able to spend virtually unlimited time in the special stage in order to collect rings and lives. A far more accurate 4-letter word for their function would be EXIT -- there is no advantage to seeking them out, and even if they represented the only way to leave the special stage it would behoove Sonic to grab all the rings before touching one, as 50 rings gains a continue (more on that later) and 100 rings an extra life, just like in the regular game. It's frustrating they weren't labeled EXIT spheres since there's more than enough room on them to fit that instead of GOAL.

Compounding the frustration from these goal spheres, they also represent the bad exit from the secret zone; Sonic's true goal is to collect the chaos emerald somewhere in each stage, generally near the "end" of it. There are 6 stages in total, each with a different emerald, and collecting them all is necessary for the game's good ending. Given that the special stage only shows up in act 1 or act 2 through the first 5 zones, that makes 10 chances to collect all the emeralds -- only allowing for the possibility of 4 failures over the course of the entire game. Combined with how different the controls are from the rest of the game (or at least how the game wants you to approach controlling Sonic through the stage), getting all six emeralds is no small feat.

That's assuming that you even get access to it in the first place. Access to the secret zone requires you to have collected 50 rings and held on to them at the end of the level. This is what I meant by the special stages addding another layer to the skill ceiling in this game: not only should you be trying to get through levels quickly, it's just as important to get through them without getting hit if you want the good ending. Like a few games from the time, I don't think they expected you to get the good ending on your first runthrough, but instead only get it after beating it once or twice at least.

Now, as I said in the previous update, I think for a lot of the game's development that the chaos emeralds were not found in the special stages at all, and were instead hiding out in certain normal stages in the game to be picked up through taking less obvious and secret routes. It's not a bad idea, but not hard to see why they changed it: the game certainly encourages speedrunning, and there isn't a separate time attack mode for people who want to just speed through the levels rather than go for completion. Placing them in the special stages makes speedrunning, 100% completion, and no-hit playthroughs all compatible with each other; a game that anyone can beat, but that requires a lot of dedication to truly master due to having so many ways in which to express that mastery. If you were to ask me what the essence of Sonic is as a game, why I continue to play Sonic games, I'd say that it's this. When a game lines up all these things together, it's something that I can spend time starting into without being frustrated and then willing to return to in order to improve my performance.

I should also note that even without the emeralds in the secret zone, there's still a purpose to it: as mentioned previously, collecting 50 rings inside of it is the only way to earn continues for Sonic. Continues aren't quite as nice as extra lives but can be crucial in a pinch: if Sonic uses up all his lives, he dips into his continue reserve instead. Continues start off as though Sonic had begun the game again, though saving his current stage progress and his emerald count; his score is wiped and his lives count is reset back to 3 like at the game start. He also restarts at the beginning of whatever stage he is on, rather than the last checkpoint he touched. While each continue implies 3 lives, they're not quite interchangeable on account of that fact, though there are several stages in which being able to regroup back at the start of the stage after a few tries is definitely handy.

The manual also shows that the special stage was supposed to have 1-up spheres in them, which I could never find when I played this game as a kid. Thanks to the power of the internet it's clear that these do not actually exist in any of the stages, but do exist in the game's code. To me that's just more evidence that these stages were messed around with pretty late into development, and they might well have been in place of the emeralds in some of the stages for a while. The stages are all designed around a being a chamber holding something, and unless previous special stage layouts were completely different from what we see here in the final (which seems unlikely given that the other levels have suspicious emerald hideout locations still intact), there must have been something where the emeralds are now. That 1-up sphere would have been a perfect choice to hold the place of the emeralds.

Feel free to take this speculation with a few grains of salt, since all I'm going on is how chaos emeralds and the special stages worked in Sonic 1 Master System. I could very well be talking out my own ass on this!



The secret zone is visually based a bit on tesselation patterns, with birds and fish alternately forming a the structure of the backdrop, fading into those green and blue squares in transition. It's hypnotic when combined with the rotating effect on the foreground of the stage, which was certainly designed to mimic the sorts of "Mode 7" effects that early SNES games tended to use. (One room in Castlevania IV -- which postdates Sonic 1 by a couple months, actually -- actually uses an effect that's almost the same as this one, but less integrated into the gameplay than the effect is here.) Certainly the developers were trying to bite off as much as they could chew, an attitude that continued in later special stage design, given that all special stages after this tried for at least a quasi-3D approach. Ambitious and flashy is the order of the day here.

Again, thanks to these backgrounds, we see Sonic's aesthetic coming straight from the 1920s, as it was in the early 20s that Escher did most of his tesselations, though he moved to his more well-known impossible structures as early as 1924. (Interestingly emerald-cut jewels were in high fashion around the same time; given that the gems of interest in these stages are neither emerald-cut nor green makes the "emerald" moniker particularly incongruous.)

It's actually a fairly straightforward effect. AS you can see, all of the square tiles in the stage rotate at the same angle each frame, so only a couple tiles in video ram need to be updated. As a result the rotation effect is smooth and actually pretty fast, almost a little dizzying. It's hard to get to grips with what's going on in the level initially, to the point where it's hard to get a sense for the shape of the stage. The developers seem to be quite aware of this and were kind enough to include footage of the stage in the demo footage at the start of the game.



Another kindness offered by the game that isn't immediately obvious is that the rotation is designed in such a way that Sonic will safely collect in the main chamber if the controls are left untouched. At the start, the stage rotates clockwise, and Sonic will fall from the starting position until he hits an R-block. The counter-clockwise rotation will funnel Sonic into the main chamber, blocked off by the semitransparent spheres seen above. Passing them causes them to become solid, effectively trapping Sonic.

In addition you'll notice from the map that the rings are leading Sonic into this direction; larger groups of rings point out the correct paths through the special stage, with the large contiguous bunch near the true center of the layout directing Sonic toward those one-way spheres. Later levels absolutely will test your perception of rings, since a stage or two has diverting paths with smaller ring trails leading toward false endings. Mean, certainly, but at least consistent with the rules of the game.



This chamber is the centerpiece of the stage, and is the aforementioned room with the chaos emerald. Every time you reach the chaos emerald in one of these stages, it's blocked by a series of crystalline cubes. Here there are only a few cubes between Sonic and the emerald, where Sonic's path to it is pretty clear. Now that the goal is so straightforward, simply letting the controls idle will no longer be a workable solution. Eventually Sonic will fall into one of the chutes on the side of this section and trigger a goal sphere.

So the game expects you to take initiative here, though it still gives you time and space to get to grips with the weirdness of the stage, and tries to keep it free of as many distractions as possible. The emerald is in plain sight in a very small chamber, and is blocked off by only a few blocks. As Sonic touches them, they change color (blue->green->yellow->red) and then are destroyed, opening a way to the emerald. Since there isn't much else to do in this chamber and the task is simple and quick enough, pretty much anyone who's gotten to this point already shouldn't have much trouble collecting that emerald. A necessary freebie given how strange these levels can feel.

Later stages will not be so kind.

If you didn't get the chaos emerald, you see this screen:


Combined with the fact that the exit spheres are printed with the word GOAL, someone who's never touched the manual wouldn't notice anything wrong. Which is probably...OK. I don't think anyone expected players to get all (or even necessarily any) of the emeralds their first go, but by the ending of the game the existence of the emeralds is made clear, hinting at a second playthrough of the game for a better ending. You'd have to see the demo to know for sure this is where the emeralds are hiding, but then the game does its damnedest to get you to see that the emerald is here in this stage. So as much as the goal spheres annoy me, they aren't a game-ruining mistake at all.

As long as you have at least one chaos emerald, the screen's a bit different:


The text has changed and all the emeralds you've collected (including the one from the just-completed stage, like in this picture) are shown. Even failing the stage won't give you the "special stage" text. This was changed in most later Sonic games.

Also, dang but do I ever enjoy looking at the goofy continue sprites.

*****

Next time I'll go back to Green Hill Zone with Act 2. I'm planning to space out the rest of the special stage posts in between each zone, since there will be one space for each remaining special stage between each zone up to Scrap Brain, where the special stages no longer appear. It shouldn't take too long to show up since Act 2 is a bit more straightforward as a level, but it still has some interesting features worth pointing out. See you then!

Hey, good-lookin'.

Hypnotic.

As a SNES kid, I always thought Sonic was Just Okay, so I appreciate the insight into why it's got such enduring appeal among fans. Great writeups.

You're doing a great job here. The Sonic games never clicked with me that well, but I agree that their best trait is the combination of branching paths within the same stage, with the fact that no single path is "correct" aside from points, rings, and minor powerups. There's a freedom to just say "I haven't gone that way in a while" or "what's up on that ledge?" without having to miss a permanent upgrade or something. Designing a game that way takes some restraint, as we may have seen a strong example of if you're correct about the original emerald placement.

Part 3: Green Hill Zone Act 2, Or, SONIC 201: Advanced Classical Mechanics

Now, you're at the wheel
Tell me how, how does it feel?
- Brown and Squire, from Waterfall (The Stone Roses)

Obligatory Zone0 "Big Picture" link.



Green Hill Zone Act 2, despite being still an introductory level, is more geared towards advanced play. Though it doesn't look significantly less linear than Act 1, it does a little more to test the limits of Sonic's abilities and give advanced players some freedom to experiment a little more.

The stage starts out with a tricky jump; no handy rings are available at the start like in Act 1, and a boulder is positioned awkwardly in Sonic's way. Jumping straight over it means Sonic is likely to hit the ground right by the first chopper, which is a fatal collision. A surprisingly technical jump for the very start of the second stage. GHZ2 does not fuck around.



Right past this is a rock with a mounted spring leading to some rings, and this oddly temping little patch of spikes. Unlike the row of spikes that subtly pointed upward in Act 1, these are very clearly sloping downward, suggesting a well-placed jump could clear them safely. This simple jump is effectively these two acts' AP exam; making the jump reduces most of the obstacles remaining in the level to a trivial status.



Ignoring this jump leads you past a crabmeat and some more choppers. This leads to a platform swinging on a pendulum that you can ride across the gap, which puts Sonic in the point in the picture; the pendulum can be ignored, dropping Sonic down (or he can roll down along the side, where the rings are). Dropping down leads to a path pointing leftwards that eventually brings Sonic to the same place the spike trap goes.

Rolling along the side may be the first place that Sonic's speed cap becomes obvious. Rolling in the air when holding right or left in the same direction Sonic is moving causes Sonic's speed in that direction to be capped. Since there is a drop about two screen-lengths away from the start of this rolling segment, Sonic will have a noticeable speed loss if left is held at that point.



Going back a bit, the AP spike jump leads Sonic to these three power ups: 20 rings and a shield. While it is possible to reach this from the other side, it's less advisable due to there being a more important power up on the other side, one that runs out with time. I'll get to it later, as it deserves a larger explanation than what I can offer in context here.



Anyway, this is roughly the same area from the other side. The mismatched wall pattern that starts at the height of the grass hints at there being something behind it. If you're on the waterfall side (where the 3 power ups are), there's no other way you can go. You're blocked by spikes (and the end of the level) on the left side. However, there's enough room to gain momentum to go into a roll to knock down the wall. It's the first of a few breakable walls, but the only one that's required of Sonic to break down in order to progress (if he came from the spike jump). Note that there simply isn't room on this side to smash into it from a roll without already destroying the power up, which is why taking it from this direction is less advisable. It's subtle, and something beginning players probably wouldn't think to do, but it's an important part of getting the most out of act 2.



Now, if you wanted, you could bypass the power up and continue going down; this leads to a path to the right over another spike pit -- unlike in act 1, this is much more deadly due a lack of safe places to fall. This is an extreme precision platforming challenge, but a completely optional (and I'd also say pointless) one.



However, this route introduces the red spring. Compared to yellow springs, red springs are much more powerful, flinging Sonic violently in the direction they point. This is also the first spring to point Sonic along the ground rather than into the air. A careless player would likely not have survived the pit trap leading up to this point, but hitting the spring will rocket Sonic right back to the end, with a rock placed to keep Sonic from getting knocked all the way into the spikes serving as the level's only salvation from skewered hedgehog.

I point this route out because this spring relates to a very important mechanic: Sonic, under foot power, has a speed cap as well. Holding the same direction Sonic is running will cause Sonic to lose a lot of speed immediately, just like in the rolling case. After having been sprung back about a screen's distance, Sonic returns to his normal running speed (which is much slower) almost instantaneously; at this speed, Sonic decelerates and switches direction very quickly. There's a sort of irony here in the way the speed cap was designed: holding right after touching the spring in order to get Sonic to slow down is actually less effective than holding in the same direction as the spring. If there's any reason to believe the ground speed cap is the result of a glitch, it's this counterintuitive mechanic here. (Also note that jumping and holding left after hitting the spring will nullify speed even faster, and allow Sonic to land stationary rather than still propelled by his own momentum.)

The speed cap is serious business.



These speed caps are why the power up that I haven't been discussing is so important. The super sneakers (or speed shoes; manuals and guides of varying levels of official capacity have never been completely uniform on what to call them) completely remove Sonic's normal speed caps. Sonic is able to get moving even as fast as those red springs would push him, and his acceleration has been augmented as well. Speed shoes turn the level layouts less into rules and more into guidelines, as Sonic can blow past many obstacles that might stop him in his tracks simply by jumping right across them, clearing large gaps in a single bound. Speed shoes are easily the most powerful upgrade that Sonic can receive, and fittingly they are also the rarest. Marble and Labryinth Zones have no speed shoes anywhere. Most of the sequels are very stingy with them as well, despite an even greater focus on speed than this game.

These speed shoes are why that lower route doesn't serve much actual purpose -- there is a spring at the end that launches Sonic to the top of the loop, where 20 rings and a 1-up await.



But you can also get there by running on the upper path and jumping before the slope back down -- Sonic goes so fast with speed shoes that he can cross the length of a whole screen before landing. A well-placed jump will get Sonic right on top of that loop. Extra life!

If you've been holding right the whole time since getting the power up, you'll probably get launched up into the air from the first curve, stay in the air for a while, and if you run back to collect the rings you missed inside the loop, will probably find your newfound speed powers running out right before the next setpiece.



After going across the loop, Sonic hits another small hill, and will almost certainly hit the invincibility hidden in the tree here. It's not the first hidden power up in a tree; there were a few in act 1 that I glossed over. This is the first one the game outright hands to you, though, and it's a fairly critical one. After this is the first enforced precision platforming sequence of the game: four up-and-down moving pillars surrounded by spikes. That invincibility is a bit of extra security against those spikes, as once again the spikes are effectively fatal on contact: knockback from them will either hit Sonic into other spikes or into the pits under the pillars.

Well, unless you still have super shoes. That rock shown in the above picture is in the perfect spot to make it past the first pit. Jumping after that will knock Sonic into the two buzzbombers over the pits, making the entire hazard trivial. This is the joy of Sonic -- breaking the levels in interesting ways that change the entire nature of the challenge. There's nothing that makes it obvious that you can make that jump, just your own bravado and some incredibly vague hinting with the placement of the rock.



Whether or not you've still got the speed shoes, the rest of the stage is pretty trivial if you've gotten this far successfully. There's a checkpoint that once again feels wrongly placed: it's after the third pillar of the four, and after that last pillar there isn't much of note to worry about. Beyond here is an easily avoidable spike pit that doesn't really have anything of note beyond it but another 10 ring monitor. Not worth the hassle.



The upper route has a few more badniks but none are arranged in any particularly threatening pattern, just more of what you've seen before. The tunnel at the end is interesting. Keeping in mind the speed caps, if you jump at the right point on the way out of the tunnel you'll rocket through a 10,000 point bonus and hit the giant ring if you're carrying 50.

*****

Act 2 is a much more straightforward level than Act 1, giving me a little time to discuss the more aesthetic construction of Green Hill Zone before I get into the more mechanical meat of it. Given how much of a staple the level's visual style is, it's worth taking a few minutes to get into it. The style's been adapted in nearly every single Sonic game since, to varying degrees of looseness. Sonic 3 (& Knuckles), Sonic Blast (a.k.a. G Sonic for Game Gear), Sonic Triple Trouble, Sonic Adventure, Sonic 06, Sonic Rush, Sonic Rush Adventure, Sonic Unleashed, and Sonic Colors are the main exceptions. Note that most of these games are 3D Sonics, which pushed for a more 'realistic' style in general, which hasn't been anywhere near as popular, especially for people who grew up with these games.

Interestingly, both Sonic Adventure 2 and Sonic Generations 3DS have near-exact copies of the first act of Green Hill Zone, both of which divorce the stage a bit from its context in this game; while the stage is iconic, act 1 and 2 still serve mostly as tutorial stages, and picking either one as being representative of this entire game does do it a bit of a disservice. Plus, Green Hill is only available to play if you have mastered everything in Advance 2, and it's a game that, unlike this one, requires you to play it in very specific ways to get that "mastery" status.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ycymywGv7c
Plus it really doesn't work well in 3D, and everything looks way out of scale to Sonic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOU6OyvWll4
The 3DS version fares much better, though it doesn't quite match the controls of the original, which is a bit of a shame. The modern Sonic ranking system is here, and I don't think an S-rank is possible without taking the route that I described as the canonical one. Yeah, those other paths are there, as you see in the video, but are still as pointless as ever.

In any case, over 20 years later, Green Hill Zone still maintains classic status almost as much for its appearance as for anything that actually went on in the level. Even just looking at its barest components, its color management, Green Hill goes above and beyond what most games were doing at the time. Genesis titles, even those from Sega, tended toward the dark and grim, like Golden Axe, Altered Beast, and Revenge of Shinobi. Meanwhile, Green Hill pushes vibrant colors even harder than any of the Mario games had done by this point, not even Super Mario World, which had been out in Japan for a while (1990) by the time Sonic came out. The bright green grass and orange-brown checkered dirt have great contrast with each other without being outright gaudy, and exude a happy atmosphere that blends well with Sonic's blue and red. Actually, it's Sonic that's muted a bit, slightly greyer than the bright blue sky behind him. That's fair enough, since we wouldn't want him blending into the background too easily; it certainly helps that unlike Mario, Sonic doesn't change form or appearance at all in this game. He is always a blue hedgehog (not true of his later games, of course).

Now, speaking of the sky, prerelease photos set the level with a much darker sky initially. It makes Sonic stand out a bit more sharply. I'm curious how long they kept it like this; these shots date back to about a year before the game release, June 1990, and screenshots from January of 1991 already show the level in a state near its finished version with the lighter sky.

Might explain why GHZ's chord progression seems almost ripped off of the Manfred Mann's Earth Band cover of "Blinded by the Light". Another runner in the night, indeed. (Yeah, even back in 1991, Sonic music was desperately trying to dodge Content ID triggers. It's a small joke among the subculture to see what tunes each Sonic song has ripped off. All the level music in this game seems to be based off other songs, some more blatant than others.)

Of course it's different enough from Blinded that 5 years later the composer, Masato Nakamura, would turn the song into a romantic jazzy tune, which is called "Marry Me?", performed by his group Dreams Come True.



This sounds utterly surreal, but in fact, the music of Sonic was a big focus of prerelease hype. The 1990 Dreams Come True tour was one of the first locations that Sonic's image was made public, through this poster. Though Dreams Come True were still a pretty new group at this point, having formed only a couple years ago back in 1988, these sorts of musical tie-ins were almost unheard of at the time, especially given how limited sound reproduction in video games tended to be; licensed music tended to be tied into whole game licenses (of course NES Duck Tales would have the Duck Tales theme song playing over its title screen). When copyrighted tunes were used in games it was usually cheekily done and unlicensed -- such as the use of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" in Rainbow Islands, or the fascinating use of Rydeen in Sega's incredibly obscure Super Locomotive arcade game.

The music was important enough to Sega that they had designed the conceit of a band fronted by Sonic himself to perform the music in-game through the sound test. Notice the existence of an early Vector the Crocodile in some concept art. Sadly, that sound test feature was scrapped late in development, but in its place is the now-classic Sega voice, used in most of the commercials at the time. Sure, that vocie is distinctive, but I would suggest that it is nowhere near as potentially interesting a feature as Sonic jamming out to the game music with some of his other anthropomorphic animal buddies.

Mostly this is just a whole lot of words to say that the distinctive, now-classic style of Sonic 1 isn't something that "just happened". It took a lot of care and, well, more than a little bit of marketing, but dang if it didn't produce something that really worked well.

Anyway, next time is Green Hill Zone 3, which is much bigger and the first opportunity the game allows us to go completely nuts. It'll be fun.

*sigh* I'm curious if anyone has ever used these tags correctly the first time.

Wrong:
Right:

Well, no wonder youtube links weren't working here. Thanks for the heads-up!

I love the surreal pop art style of early Sonic, of which Green Hill is probably the best example. The bent palm fronds, the recessed sections in the walls, and of course the checkerboard pattern—it's all very unique and gives the game a distinct identity just as much as Sonic himself does. Spring Yard is probably the next prime example to come, with the ominous neon letters hanging in the air and all. Some other high marks are Casino Night in 2, Icecap in 3, and most of Sonic CD.

Sonic CD's great. It's probably the game that feels most like a direct successor to Sonic 1, and it has the same large, elaborate backgrounds this game tends toward.

I'd like to go back in time and slap the me who used to say that Sonic CD was a romhacky mess. SLAP! LEARN2PLAY

Sorry for the huge delay on GHZ3 so far. School just started up again and I'll be visiting my girlfriend over the next several days. I'm hoping to get GHZ3 done by tonight basically but it will be a while before I get to Marble.