I'd like to share how I discovered Sonic and my personal take on SEGA as a gamer from China.
In China, Sonic was once a much bigger name. But today, many younger players may not even recognize him. Twenty years ago, most of us couldn't afford original SEGA hardware. Instead, we played MD/Genesis games through a VCD player called "Xin Tian Li." Here's the interesting part: the machine actually had a legitimate license from SEGA—but it was licensed as a VCD player, not a game console. The company behind it then flooded the market with pirated MD game discs, and quietly turned a blind eye to users running them on the machine. Most players at the time had no idea about any of this—they just knew they could play Sonic on this weird VCD player, and that was enough.
That's how an entire generation of Chinese gamers got their first taste of Sonic—through a gray-area loophole that we didn't even know was a loophole.
Pirated or not, those memories are precious to me. Sonic felt completely different from anything else—high-speed side-scrolling action was mind-blowing at the time. Later, when I grew up and learned about the development stories behind those classics, I gained even more respect for the creativity and craft of the original teams. To this day, I've purchased over a dozen officially licensed Sonic games.
So why isn't Sonic as big in China? I think one major reason is that SEGA deliberately positioned Sonic as Mario's edgy rival—"Mario is for kids, Sonic is for older players." That marketing worked in some regions, but in China, the post-MD era left a gap. Most players never got hands-on with later Sonic titles, and over time, they gravitated toward other franchises. For example, Persona 5 Royal has a huge meme status here—"P5R is the greatest JRPG ever" is practically gospel among fans.
That said, I'm still grateful to Sonic. He gave me a new perspective on gaming: face your fears, keep running forward, and never look back.
A friend of mine once put it this way: "SEGA always starts with a brilliant, sky-high concept, but the execution often falls just short of greatness. It's not that the games are bad—they're always missing that little extra something."
One small regret: I ordered a limited-edition artist-collaboration plush toy—the "SEGA Sonic × Kosuke Kawamura" collectible. But it hasn't arrived yet. Seeing the promo images just makes me want it even more!
Happy 35th, Sonic. Keep running.
Nice write up frenchfrynoob, I enjoyed reading it.
Atari, later Sega, always appealed to me more than Nintendo. I enjoyed all the Mario games, but as a child I did not see any appeal or desire to have a overweight, believed to be Italian, plumber as a role model. Sonic was fast, had a somewhat sarcastic/smart talking persona and early on had a more prominent pro-enviromental message, which went along with Captain Planet and other cartoons airing on TV at the time. So that all hooked me quite early.
A bit later, I also picked up from the evening news that Nintendo was somewhat of a cheerleader for the Parents Music Resource Center and Parents Television & Media Council, so they were frankly lame to me. Sega allowing blood in Mortal Kombat was an important issue at the time, ha.
I always played the Sega demo units when I went to stores with my parents and I would guess I first encountered Sonic in 1991 at the electronics section inside a Montgomery Ward that was an anchor store to my somewhat (20-30 min drive) local mall. I definitely know now that those employees working there were wondering when I would leave. My parents would just leave me there and go about their business. That demo unit tradition never stopped until the early 2000s.
Even when I was working and driving, if I stopped into the mall, I would see what was new for the Sega Saturn, Game Gear and later Dreamcast.
Now I am old and invest in Sega. The company oddly means a lot to me, from arcades to home consoles and even amusements. The first cutting board I got for my camper van was a wooden Sonic the Hedgehog one, heh. :) though sadly it got destroyed over the past very cold winter.