Sonic 3 and Knuckles
Aug 30, 2019 17:11:40 GMT -5
Post by anayo on Aug 30, 2019 17:11:40 GMT -5
In Winter of 1995, I asked my Dad if Santa could bring me a Sega Saturn with Bug. Unbeknownst to me, this would have cost $460. My Dad got a conflicted look on his face and said, “Santa will bring you a Sega. It might not necessarily be a Sega Saturn, but it will be a Sega.” So, that Christmas I received a Sega Genesis with VR Troopers, Vectorman, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, and Sonic and Knuckles.
Playing Sonic 3 and Knuckles on Christmas morning in 1995 is weird to try to explain in 2019. I feel as though someone who hasn’t played a lot of video games from the mid 90’s might not grasp everything that made it so cool, even after viewing videos and screenshots online. In this entry I want to explore the perspective of why this game was so special in its day through my personal memories.
From the early to late 90’s, console gaming generally meant Sega Genesis or Super Nintendo. Each one focused on a different style of gameplay. Super Nintendo tended to specialize in games that offered long-term experiences best suited to gaming at home. Therefore, the SNES was better for RPGs like Chrono Trigger or exploration games like Super Metroid. Even Super Mario World escaped its 1980’s arcade trappings with elements that persisted after you powered down the game, like colored block switches on the world map.
Sega Genesis was more about bringing the arcade into your house. This entailed a much different approach because arcades were pay to play amusement machines installed in venues such as bowling alleys, shopping malls, or pizza parlors. Arcade game design called for bombast and brevity because nobody would want to spend money on a full-blown Dungeons and Dragons quest just to kill time at a laundromat. With this in mind, most Sega Genesis games I played as a kid were short, action packed experiences that you were expected to beat in one sitting. When you turned off the power, all your progress vanished from RAM.
While Sonic 3 and Knuckles has a backup battery to save your progress, it’s still more or less an arcade game because other than completing the stages themselves, almost nothing you do makes a lasting impact on the game world. Each stage is a themed playground full of toys that amount to virtual see-saws and swing sets. Examples:
Angel Island Zone: ziplines, hollow tree trunks Sonic enters and runs up in a spiral
Hydrocity Zone: water slides, conveyor belts Sonic grabs with his hands
Marble Garden Zone: a spinning top Sonic runs on top of making him hover, collapsing scenery
Carnival Night Zone: elastic bouncing cylinders, pinball bumpers, cannons to launch Sonic into the air
Icecap Zone: a high speed downhill snowboard ride that happens once during the level intro and literally never again
These serve little purpose except visceral exhilaration. They didn’t give you XP or daily accomplishments. They were just cool doodads to help you move from left to right and finish the stage. Also, S3&K is a very easy game. I think the point was more to whisk players through its nonsensical roller coaster world than it was to present anyone with a real challenge to overcome.
Aside from the stages you’ve beaten, the only accomplishment that stays around in S3&K when you power down the console are the chaos emeralds. To earn emeralds, you must find hidden giant rings which transport you to a bonus stage. When you beat the bonus stage, you earn an emerald. When you earn 7 emeralds, you can become Super Sonic, which means you’re even more insanely fast and also invincible - at least until your rings run out, since becoming Super Sonic slowly depletes your ring supply. I think the Chaos Emeralds exist mostly to give you something else to strive for other than just beating all the stages. They’re also an excuse for bonus stages, which themselves are just excuses for a change of scenery and ostentatious special effects.
One time in 1996 a friend of mine came over to play. The very first thing I wanted to show him was the chaos emerald bonus stages. Sonic entered a giant ring and suddenly he was running deeper into the screen on a 3D checkerboard sphere covered in blue and red spheres which moved through space, growing larger as they drew near and shrinking as they grew distant. My friend’s eyes widened with surprise and he said, “This is DIFFERENT.” Of course, there were 3D arcade and PC games back then, but home consoles didn’t tend to have visuals like that. It was disarmingly cool.
I think the designers of S3&K wanted to cultivate the impression that Sonic occupies 3D space and isn’t just a flat cardboard cutout, because there are animations in the game that serve no purpose except to point this out. In Carnival Night Zone, if you stand on the rotating bouncy cylinders, Sonic’s body rotates along with them. You’re treated to an 8 frame animation (16 if you count mirrored frames) showing Sonic spinning 360 degrees. I suspect most people today might not even notice this, since all our games look like CGI movies now, but in the days of Sega Genesis this was nothing short of remarkable.
Also: in 1995, CGI effects were still quite uncommon. I was aware of exactly 2 high profile movies with animated CGI creatures: Jurassic Park and Toy Story. So, imagine my surprise in S3&K, when upon booting the game for first time, the first thing I see is an animation of a CGI rendered Sonic rushing toward the screen then coalescing with the logo. A specular highlight glints on his forehead and Gourad shading darkens his spines - signature characteristics of CG renderings from that time. Seeing this in a Genesis game was jaw-dropping, especially on the title screen. Talk about first impressions! I think in today’s CGI-saturated world the impressiveness of this spectacle gets lost in translation.
Everything in S3&K insanely colorful. This is noteworthy because the Genesis had an inherent limitation where it could only produce 64 colors on screen at the same time. They mitigate this in S3&K via artistically chosen color palettes, but upon closer inspection during my 2019 play through, I was taken aback by how much dithering is in this game. Dithering is when artists would fill in every other pixel with alternating colors to produce the illusion of “blending” or intermediate colors that weren’t actually present in the artwork. I want to draw attention to this floating balloon thing in Carnival Night Zone:
This puffy, rubbery shape was not something ordinarily seen in Genesis sprites. I just don’t think the medium inherently lent itself to it. Obviously they pulled it off here, but you definitely wouldn’t have seen this in a late 80’s or early 90’s Genesis title. As a kid I could tell there was something special about what I was seeing, I just didn’t have the vocabulary to explain why or how.
I was also taken aback by how tangible metal surfaces look in S3&K. Some sprites of mechanical enemies have shiny specular highlights and even the faintest suggestion of an environmental reflection. It wasn’t common to see this attention to detail in sprite artwork back then, especially not on a 16-bit console.
Sonic 3 & Knuckles exhibits the same excellence in its soundtrack. Unlike today, high bandwidth audio streams weren’t really viable on a home console, so for music and sound effects the Sega Genesis used FM synthesis. From what I understand, this technology involves math equations layered over each other in order to oscillate sound waves and make them sound somewhat like musical instruments. I say “somewhat” because games using it had a surreal, “twangy” quality. Of course, being exposed to it so much as a kid, I have an almost Pavlovian response to it now, much to the chagrin of my parents. Today my Mom calls it “twinkle music”. In 1996 I had a friend over. I wanted to take him upstairs and show him S3&K on my Sega Genesis (I think it was the same kid who was amazed at the 3D bonus stages). I had finished eating lunch, but he hadn’t. So I said, “That’s OK, I’ll go upstairs and turn the volume up really loud so you can hear it down here.” My mom said, “No, you will NOT do that.”
By the standards of FM synth, S3&K has an incredible soundtrack. All the tracks have strong drum lines with deep base and well placed high hats. The lead instruments might equate to horns and synth keyboards. The most notable instrument is the steel drum, featured in the stage select screen and Angel Island Zone. I have literally never heard a steel drum in any other Genesis game before. S3&K’s soundtrack has a cool style, but it’s a notion of cool from a different time period, which I couldn’t perceive in 1995 because that time period was still underway. Again, my musical background isn’t strong enough to completely describe what I’m hearing, but it’s full of specific riffs, bass lines, and voice samples taking cues from late 80’s and early 90’s hip hop or rap. The prevailing conspiracy theory is that Michael Jackson helped compose S3&K’s score, but personally it reminds me of the days when you could listen to 2 Unlimited unironically.
Even though S3&K is an arcade game at heart, the different stages convey the feeling of embarking on a long journey. Along the way, Knuckles the Echidna antagonizes Sonic in various ways. The instruction manual tells that Knuckles - the guardian of the Chaos Emeralds - is a good guy, but that Dr. Robotnic has deceived him into opposing Sonic. These “cut scenes” are no more than voiceless pantomime. Knuckles will appear, smugly cross his arms, then flip a switch to inconvenience Sonic. In one part, Knuckles throws a bomb, destroying a building Sonic is inside of. It’s strange to think I was so captivated by these intermissions now that almost all games have cinematic exposition and voice acting.
The scale of Sonic’s journey becomes apparent when you reach Hidden Palace Zone, an underground sanctuary belonging to Knuckles’ tribe. You enter a chamber adorned with a Mayan-style mosaic foreshadowing the impending fight between Super Sonic and Dr. Robotnic. After you fight Knuckles, Dr. Robotnic appears and steals Knuckles’ master emerald. Then Knuckles realizes the error of his ways and changes sides, lending a hand to help Sonic. It sounds so quaint to call this “character development” or a “plot twist” today, but at the time this was a step beyond what a video game was expected to do.
In the penultimate stage, Sonic climbs an ancient tower carrying him high into the clouds. The tower collapses and Sonic jumps onto Dr. Robotnic’s mothership just as it lifts off into space. After fighting through the mothership itself, Sonic confronts Robotnic himself in orbit around earth. Back in the 16-bit days you knew a game was good if it ended in outer space. It’s something that S3&K has in common with other great Genesis games, like Rocket Knight Adventures and Gunstar Heroes.
I have a few specific memories demonstrating how much this game meant to me. During recess in first grade, my classmates and I would play make-believe on the playground. There was a girl my age who wanted to pretend we were Mario in the mushroom kingdom. I wasn’t having any of it. All I could think about was Sonic, so I refused to play anything else. She seemed a little dejected about it, but went along with my whims. I feel kinda bad about that now.
Another time a classmate and I were talking about Sonic the Hedgehog. We started calling Dr. Robotnic “Dr. Robuttnic”, which was the pinnacle of comedic genius for us. Our teacher overhead us and admonished us for talking that way. We tried to explain to her, “No, it’s OK. Dr. Robotnic is a bad guy. He deserves it.” She said, “I don’t care, don’t say that.”
Another time I was at an after-school daycare where they had a bucket of Lego. I wanted to build the mid-stage boss from Flying Battery Zone - the one that looks just like the big mechanical cage Robotnic uses to capture all the innocent animals, but when you hit the switch on top, it instead morphs into an angry robot you have to defeat. My Lego version bore little resemblance to the game. His “hands” were just candy-colored cubes and the “orbs” linking his arms to his head were Lego chains with little gray links. But I was till really proud of it. It’s weird how 16-bit video games used to do that special effect with circular sprites, daisy chaining them together to make serpents and tentacles and stuff. It’s basically an obsolete effect now, but back then it looked super impressive. At least it made enough of an impact on me that I wanted to recreate it in Lego form.
My only other memory is one time I was trying to explain the Chaos Emeralds to my Mom. I was very convicted about it, like I had to get the gravity of the issue across to her. I said something like, “OK Mom, the important thing is, there are seven chaos emeralds. But there’s not really seven, because when you get those, you can get the super emeralds. So technically there are fourteen chaos emeralds.” I think Mom was staring into the distance and said something like, “I see.”
Today, Sonic is still around, but anyone who remembers will tell you he’s nowhere near as influential or relevant as he was 24 years ago. Some Genesis-era Sonic fans argue this is because Sega mishandled Sonic in the ensuing years. I only halfway agree with this. The reason for this is that I consider Sonic to be uncannily similar to another popular 90’s mascot character who declined in the 2000’s, namely Star Fox. People who are nostalgic for Star Fox seem to think the character himself held some inherent appeal. I would argue that Star Fox only served as a vehicle to make Super FX chip-enabled 3D polygons on the SNES more personable and interesting. My contention is that 3D polygons on a 16-bit console was what wowed people, not woodland fighter pilots, and the circumstances that made this spectacle so memorable only applied in 1993 and a few short years afterward. I have the same suspicion about Sonic, except in Sonic’s case I can’t point to one unifying reason (such as a Super FX chip) that made Sonic so interesting in his heyday. It was more of a subtle list of 90’s gaming expectations and conventions, many of which are lost in translation today except to those who remember the gaming landscape from back then.
Playing Sonic 3 and Knuckles on Christmas morning in 1995 is weird to try to explain in 2019. I feel as though someone who hasn’t played a lot of video games from the mid 90’s might not grasp everything that made it so cool, even after viewing videos and screenshots online. In this entry I want to explore the perspective of why this game was so special in its day through my personal memories.
From the early to late 90’s, console gaming generally meant Sega Genesis or Super Nintendo. Each one focused on a different style of gameplay. Super Nintendo tended to specialize in games that offered long-term experiences best suited to gaming at home. Therefore, the SNES was better for RPGs like Chrono Trigger or exploration games like Super Metroid. Even Super Mario World escaped its 1980’s arcade trappings with elements that persisted after you powered down the game, like colored block switches on the world map.
Sega Genesis was more about bringing the arcade into your house. This entailed a much different approach because arcades were pay to play amusement machines installed in venues such as bowling alleys, shopping malls, or pizza parlors. Arcade game design called for bombast and brevity because nobody would want to spend money on a full-blown Dungeons and Dragons quest just to kill time at a laundromat. With this in mind, most Sega Genesis games I played as a kid were short, action packed experiences that you were expected to beat in one sitting. When you turned off the power, all your progress vanished from RAM.
While Sonic 3 and Knuckles has a backup battery to save your progress, it’s still more or less an arcade game because other than completing the stages themselves, almost nothing you do makes a lasting impact on the game world. Each stage is a themed playground full of toys that amount to virtual see-saws and swing sets. Examples:
Angel Island Zone: ziplines, hollow tree trunks Sonic enters and runs up in a spiral
Hydrocity Zone: water slides, conveyor belts Sonic grabs with his hands
Marble Garden Zone: a spinning top Sonic runs on top of making him hover, collapsing scenery
Carnival Night Zone: elastic bouncing cylinders, pinball bumpers, cannons to launch Sonic into the air
Icecap Zone: a high speed downhill snowboard ride that happens once during the level intro and literally never again
These serve little purpose except visceral exhilaration. They didn’t give you XP or daily accomplishments. They were just cool doodads to help you move from left to right and finish the stage. Also, S3&K is a very easy game. I think the point was more to whisk players through its nonsensical roller coaster world than it was to present anyone with a real challenge to overcome.
Aside from the stages you’ve beaten, the only accomplishment that stays around in S3&K when you power down the console are the chaos emeralds. To earn emeralds, you must find hidden giant rings which transport you to a bonus stage. When you beat the bonus stage, you earn an emerald. When you earn 7 emeralds, you can become Super Sonic, which means you’re even more insanely fast and also invincible - at least until your rings run out, since becoming Super Sonic slowly depletes your ring supply. I think the Chaos Emeralds exist mostly to give you something else to strive for other than just beating all the stages. They’re also an excuse for bonus stages, which themselves are just excuses for a change of scenery and ostentatious special effects.
One time in 1996 a friend of mine came over to play. The very first thing I wanted to show him was the chaos emerald bonus stages. Sonic entered a giant ring and suddenly he was running deeper into the screen on a 3D checkerboard sphere covered in blue and red spheres which moved through space, growing larger as they drew near and shrinking as they grew distant. My friend’s eyes widened with surprise and he said, “This is DIFFERENT.” Of course, there were 3D arcade and PC games back then, but home consoles didn’t tend to have visuals like that. It was disarmingly cool.
I think the designers of S3&K wanted to cultivate the impression that Sonic occupies 3D space and isn’t just a flat cardboard cutout, because there are animations in the game that serve no purpose except to point this out. In Carnival Night Zone, if you stand on the rotating bouncy cylinders, Sonic’s body rotates along with them. You’re treated to an 8 frame animation (16 if you count mirrored frames) showing Sonic spinning 360 degrees. I suspect most people today might not even notice this, since all our games look like CGI movies now, but in the days of Sega Genesis this was nothing short of remarkable.
Also: in 1995, CGI effects were still quite uncommon. I was aware of exactly 2 high profile movies with animated CGI creatures: Jurassic Park and Toy Story. So, imagine my surprise in S3&K, when upon booting the game for first time, the first thing I see is an animation of a CGI rendered Sonic rushing toward the screen then coalescing with the logo. A specular highlight glints on his forehead and Gourad shading darkens his spines - signature characteristics of CG renderings from that time. Seeing this in a Genesis game was jaw-dropping, especially on the title screen. Talk about first impressions! I think in today’s CGI-saturated world the impressiveness of this spectacle gets lost in translation.
Everything in S3&K insanely colorful. This is noteworthy because the Genesis had an inherent limitation where it could only produce 64 colors on screen at the same time. They mitigate this in S3&K via artistically chosen color palettes, but upon closer inspection during my 2019 play through, I was taken aback by how much dithering is in this game. Dithering is when artists would fill in every other pixel with alternating colors to produce the illusion of “blending” or intermediate colors that weren’t actually present in the artwork. I want to draw attention to this floating balloon thing in Carnival Night Zone:
This puffy, rubbery shape was not something ordinarily seen in Genesis sprites. I just don’t think the medium inherently lent itself to it. Obviously they pulled it off here, but you definitely wouldn’t have seen this in a late 80’s or early 90’s Genesis title. As a kid I could tell there was something special about what I was seeing, I just didn’t have the vocabulary to explain why or how.
I was also taken aback by how tangible metal surfaces look in S3&K. Some sprites of mechanical enemies have shiny specular highlights and even the faintest suggestion of an environmental reflection. It wasn’t common to see this attention to detail in sprite artwork back then, especially not on a 16-bit console.
Sonic 3 & Knuckles exhibits the same excellence in its soundtrack. Unlike today, high bandwidth audio streams weren’t really viable on a home console, so for music and sound effects the Sega Genesis used FM synthesis. From what I understand, this technology involves math equations layered over each other in order to oscillate sound waves and make them sound somewhat like musical instruments. I say “somewhat” because games using it had a surreal, “twangy” quality. Of course, being exposed to it so much as a kid, I have an almost Pavlovian response to it now, much to the chagrin of my parents. Today my Mom calls it “twinkle music”. In 1996 I had a friend over. I wanted to take him upstairs and show him S3&K on my Sega Genesis (I think it was the same kid who was amazed at the 3D bonus stages). I had finished eating lunch, but he hadn’t. So I said, “That’s OK, I’ll go upstairs and turn the volume up really loud so you can hear it down here.” My mom said, “No, you will NOT do that.”
By the standards of FM synth, S3&K has an incredible soundtrack. All the tracks have strong drum lines with deep base and well placed high hats. The lead instruments might equate to horns and synth keyboards. The most notable instrument is the steel drum, featured in the stage select screen and Angel Island Zone. I have literally never heard a steel drum in any other Genesis game before. S3&K’s soundtrack has a cool style, but it’s a notion of cool from a different time period, which I couldn’t perceive in 1995 because that time period was still underway. Again, my musical background isn’t strong enough to completely describe what I’m hearing, but it’s full of specific riffs, bass lines, and voice samples taking cues from late 80’s and early 90’s hip hop or rap. The prevailing conspiracy theory is that Michael Jackson helped compose S3&K’s score, but personally it reminds me of the days when you could listen to 2 Unlimited unironically.
Even though S3&K is an arcade game at heart, the different stages convey the feeling of embarking on a long journey. Along the way, Knuckles the Echidna antagonizes Sonic in various ways. The instruction manual tells that Knuckles - the guardian of the Chaos Emeralds - is a good guy, but that Dr. Robotnic has deceived him into opposing Sonic. These “cut scenes” are no more than voiceless pantomime. Knuckles will appear, smugly cross his arms, then flip a switch to inconvenience Sonic. In one part, Knuckles throws a bomb, destroying a building Sonic is inside of. It’s strange to think I was so captivated by these intermissions now that almost all games have cinematic exposition and voice acting.
The scale of Sonic’s journey becomes apparent when you reach Hidden Palace Zone, an underground sanctuary belonging to Knuckles’ tribe. You enter a chamber adorned with a Mayan-style mosaic foreshadowing the impending fight between Super Sonic and Dr. Robotnic. After you fight Knuckles, Dr. Robotnic appears and steals Knuckles’ master emerald. Then Knuckles realizes the error of his ways and changes sides, lending a hand to help Sonic. It sounds so quaint to call this “character development” or a “plot twist” today, but at the time this was a step beyond what a video game was expected to do.
In the penultimate stage, Sonic climbs an ancient tower carrying him high into the clouds. The tower collapses and Sonic jumps onto Dr. Robotnic’s mothership just as it lifts off into space. After fighting through the mothership itself, Sonic confronts Robotnic himself in orbit around earth. Back in the 16-bit days you knew a game was good if it ended in outer space. It’s something that S3&K has in common with other great Genesis games, like Rocket Knight Adventures and Gunstar Heroes.
I have a few specific memories demonstrating how much this game meant to me. During recess in first grade, my classmates and I would play make-believe on the playground. There was a girl my age who wanted to pretend we were Mario in the mushroom kingdom. I wasn’t having any of it. All I could think about was Sonic, so I refused to play anything else. She seemed a little dejected about it, but went along with my whims. I feel kinda bad about that now.
Another time a classmate and I were talking about Sonic the Hedgehog. We started calling Dr. Robotnic “Dr. Robuttnic”, which was the pinnacle of comedic genius for us. Our teacher overhead us and admonished us for talking that way. We tried to explain to her, “No, it’s OK. Dr. Robotnic is a bad guy. He deserves it.” She said, “I don’t care, don’t say that.”
Another time I was at an after-school daycare where they had a bucket of Lego. I wanted to build the mid-stage boss from Flying Battery Zone - the one that looks just like the big mechanical cage Robotnic uses to capture all the innocent animals, but when you hit the switch on top, it instead morphs into an angry robot you have to defeat. My Lego version bore little resemblance to the game. His “hands” were just candy-colored cubes and the “orbs” linking his arms to his head were Lego chains with little gray links. But I was till really proud of it. It’s weird how 16-bit video games used to do that special effect with circular sprites, daisy chaining them together to make serpents and tentacles and stuff. It’s basically an obsolete effect now, but back then it looked super impressive. At least it made enough of an impact on me that I wanted to recreate it in Lego form.
My only other memory is one time I was trying to explain the Chaos Emeralds to my Mom. I was very convicted about it, like I had to get the gravity of the issue across to her. I said something like, “OK Mom, the important thing is, there are seven chaos emeralds. But there’s not really seven, because when you get those, you can get the super emeralds. So technically there are fourteen chaos emeralds.” I think Mom was staring into the distance and said something like, “I see.”
Today, Sonic is still around, but anyone who remembers will tell you he’s nowhere near as influential or relevant as he was 24 years ago. Some Genesis-era Sonic fans argue this is because Sega mishandled Sonic in the ensuing years. I only halfway agree with this. The reason for this is that I consider Sonic to be uncannily similar to another popular 90’s mascot character who declined in the 2000’s, namely Star Fox. People who are nostalgic for Star Fox seem to think the character himself held some inherent appeal. I would argue that Star Fox only served as a vehicle to make Super FX chip-enabled 3D polygons on the SNES more personable and interesting. My contention is that 3D polygons on a 16-bit console was what wowed people, not woodland fighter pilots, and the circumstances that made this spectacle so memorable only applied in 1993 and a few short years afterward. I have the same suspicion about Sonic, except in Sonic’s case I can’t point to one unifying reason (such as a Super FX chip) that made Sonic so interesting in his heyday. It was more of a subtle list of 90’s gaming expectations and conventions, many of which are lost in translation today except to those who remember the gaming landscape from back then.