You must listen to me: right now, right now, there has never been a better time to revive the conflict that has divided games for a generation. We all know neither Sonic nor Mario has had an entry that made any relevant impact on game design since the nineties. If you show me an exception to this I will show you my knife. This is a serious discussion about an eternal dichotomy within games and while we have time to talk about games we do not have time to play them.
If we’re interested in the Mario/Sonic duality the first thing we need to do is stop talking about game they have starred in for the last two decades and we need to start talking about the games made in inspiration or passionate fan homage to them. As products, Sonic and Mario are simply containers for the money of two corporations and the varying degrees of success they have enjoyed over the years. Sonic and Mario are capable of morphing into any form required of them, limited only by corporate budget and corporate imagination. If we wanted to talk about that, we’d spend our time on Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games(tm).
What I’m interested in, and you are too, if you share my point of view or have respect for the knife I’m holding, is the difference between people who like Sonic and people who like Mario. It would be more precise to frame this not as “Mario fans” or “Sonic fans” but what people tend to find fascinating about these games, what about these games embeds in their brains and what the resulting output looks like. This is why we don’t want to look at Mario and Sonic themselves; we want to look at the impression those games left on multiple generations and the best way to do that is to look at the games they’ve made in imitation or inspiration.
The most pronounced difference between Mario and Sonic is that there is near-universal agreement and consensus on what Mario is and none whatsoever on what Sonic is. Mario is iconic, irreducible; there are not Mario “fangames” because Mario is platonic ideal of a platformer, and games are necessarily additive because the core is so difficult to imagine improving on. There aren’t Mario fangames, but there are Sonic fangames. Mario is perfectly Mario. Sonic has never been perfectly Sonic since the very first games, not even the ones everyone likes and thinks are good. Early Sonic games, by virtue of being good and as close to perfect as possible, are guilty of the crime that drove the fandom mad: there isn’t enough Sonic in them. They suggest a whole world full of unrealized characters and possibilities, a world so fascinating because there is so little of it. Mario is already complete, so games are inspired by Mario. Sonic is incomplete, so fans yearn to complete Sonic.
There are not Mario fangames in the sense there are Sonic fangames; Mario games are made almost universally within existing Mario game frameworks. Mario Maker is late to its own party, as Super Mario World and Super Mario Bros. 3 hacks were wildly popular long before the release of these officially supported ways to remix Mario. Fans were creating in the strict confines of the sanctity and purity of the Mario experience even without the insistence of one of the most insistent and orthodoxy-enforcing brands of all time. If anything, Mario fans get mad when Nintendo doesn’t give them access to enough of the core experience of Mario, the power to replicate the games faithfully and completely.
Communities that work in the medium of Mario push the challenge and technique of the games to ludicrous extremes; the Kaizo hacks and those inspired by them are so Mario as to be un-Mario. This is a goal that most games inspired by Mario share, either by adding mechanics or pushing required technique further and further to create something unique. Games like Braid or Celeste pay homage to their source material but make a point of being their own thing. Working in Mario means either reacting against it or following its loose ends to a degree that ends up barely resembling what it was originally intended to be. Mario's vocabulary is already so deeply explored that you either speak in that language or invent your own.
Mario games come with a toy chest of tools to rearrange in creative new ways, but the mechanics and gimmicks Sonic throws at the player wear out their depth very quickly. These gimmicks don't have staying power because their entire purpose is usually to propel the player away; you complete a Sonic level by using them to move efficiently, but there’s never very much pressure to do so and you never have to figure much out in Sonic. There isn't a similarly dedicated community that endlessly remixes hard and more technical levels of Sonic the Hedgehog. There are Mario fans that want more Mario and Sonic fans that want more Sonic, but they want very different things. You can rearrange the basic elements of a Mario game and get more Mario. You can’t get very far making more Sonic with what Sonic games already contain. That’s not what we want out of Sonic anyway.
Sonic games are about holding right and being wowed by the whole experience of the level, including its music, art, and the unique feeling of each world’s mechanics. They don’t have to be deep to give the player a sense of slogging through an ocean of oil, or running through a ruin made of implausible racetracks, or being trapped like a ball in a pachinko machine. These games are about experiencing something very pretty in a frictionless way that suggests a world with tons of depth and possibility without having to actually realize it. The aesthetic elements of Sonic are crucial to the whole experience, while Mario games are able to be very abstract. Cute and pleasing to be sure, but they’re about the technical elements more than the full experience. Sonic does not contain within itself the possibility of More Sonic; you cannot take the basic elements of a Sonic level and make something substantially more fresh and new and interesting. To make More Sonic, you have to actually create more Sonic from scratch.
Sonic inspires fangames because there always seems like there should be more to Sonic than there is; both to the games themselves and the characters that inhabit them. Mario has never needed to be anything but Mario. He is a cute mascot that serves as an avatar for movement and interaction; he doesn’t inspire much speculation about who he is. Sonic and his worlds invite you to speculate more about them. Players make Sonic fangames because they want more out of Sonic, and they want more out of Sonic because these games are so good at provoking that imagination. The more janky and incoherent Sonic games get, the more they inspire this reaction. First it was “what’s the story of this world Sonic’s in?” Then it becomes “what story would actually make sense in this world?"
Mario-inspired design is more stable, substantive, and mechanics-focused. Sonic is about the total aesthetic experience, and falls apart without it. Mario has so much to teach about design and so much to build on and be inspired by. There’s so much to use for designers and so much to learn from. Mario carries an air of refinement suitable for making a game about how breaking up with someone is kind of like inventing the atomic bomb. Sonic has the unshakeable aura of 90s dub voice acting and inappropriately edgy American-licensed comics.
Despite that, I prefer Sonic, because Sonic is such an inspiring example of presentation triumphing over mechanics. Games aren’t just a series of puzzles and interactions. Games are the Whole Thing. Sonic doesn’t have very much to teach about platforming mechanics you couldn’t learn better elsewhere, but the mechanics are perfect for conveying the player through a beautiful level with beautiful music and having it feel good and so like that beautiful impossible place it is, even if it’s for a brief moment you spend 90% of holding right.
I spend a lot of time with mechanics and design but I believe in games as the Whole Thing, not just one part with a bit of something else sprinkled on. Mario is often very cute and charming but I like being inside a Sonic level more. I also like games that ask me to think about all the characters and world and even if they have nothing to say about them or say worse and more confusing things about them with every new game, there’s more juice there than Nintendo’s platonic platforming avatar. You can google your name+the hedgehog and get a picture of an original anthropomorphic Hedgehog. You can’t do that with Mario.
