2005, Sonic the Hedgehog, and suspension of disbelief

2005. Summer. Dad is drinking one of the beers he calls "stubbies" because they come in squat little bottles. He is sitting on a blue sofa in a burgundy red room with yellow carpet and I am ignoring the in retrospect unforgivable clash of colours by directing my eyes squarely at the television which, given that this is 2005, is roughly a billion feet deep. It is a good size, though, to display that summer's diversion of choice. In the coddled doldrums of the school summer holidays, I have - off the back of a frankly incredible experience with my friend's Sega Genesis - jumped onto the Sonic bandwagon. As a precocious brat at the time, I don't remember thanking my parents enough for buying a chunky Xbox and a copy of Sonic Heroes to play on it - but I took to video games like a duck takes to skydiving, which is to say it was laborious and perhaps ill-considered.

The remainder of my memories from that summer are patchy: I might've gone to a wedding (painfully dull when you're too young), or worn some ill advised shirt-on-top-of-long-sleeved-top combo, or broken into an old sugar beet factory with an old-er friend. The noughties are a closed book to us all, in some regards. However, one of the few things I can say for sure is this: just as my nimble little fingers began to grasp the controls of Sonic Heroes, fighting off a giant airship in an infinite sepia canyon, my dad commented between sips of Flemish lager something that proved surprisingly poignant:

"What’s going on in this game?”

There is a running joke (is it a joke?) that Sonic the Hedgehog games have been in steady decline ever since he made the uneasy (and frequently queasy) transition to 3D. Sonic began as a rebellious figure against the establishment Mario. He was more self-aware than the plumber, what with his finger-wagging and toe-tapping. And that was, broadly, the whole spirit of early Sonic: run fast, free captured animals, thwart plans of fat man, make snarky look to camera. As Sonic strode on from game to game, the storylines grew more complex: he was no longer thwarting the plans of a fat man but also maybe a gliding red marsupial and a metal version of himself. Fast forward a touch and Sonic is fighting some water in the shape of a nun. Next game, he's challenging an emo impersonator and a lizard attached to the Death Star. Perhaps the nadir was in 2006, when Sonic, a cartoon anthropomorphic hedgehog, would flirt with a real human girl and challenge a mythical demigod that still insisted on being shaped like a hedgehog.

When my dad asked me what was happening in Sonic Heroes, the franchise was halfway between the lizard Death Star and the hedgehog/human romance. I could have told him that the giant airship was piloted by Dr Eggman – the aptly-named fat man mentioned earlier – but that was about it. The story of Sonic Heroes also features the metal hedgehog from earlier melting into a frog and then later turning into a giant dragon that is also a hedgehog, notable because it can fly sometimes.

Mind you: the narrative element of 3D Sonic games is hardly their only flaw. Many of the games have irresolvable camera issues, leading to characters falling out of the level without any player input, or game-breaking glitches that require a hard reset. But there’s a greater degree of universality to the story problem: even Sonic games with passable or better gameplay struggle with stories that are either incoherent or tonally inconsistent. Examples are easy pickings: Sonic Colours is a fast-paced platforming romp, but it juxtaposes alien colonialism to Seinfeld-esque comedy and fails to emphasise the best elements of either. Sonic Generations offers a wonderful synthesis of 3D and 2D gameplay, but it never makes it clear exactly why the game is actually taking place. In that respect, it actually fails to meet the benchmark set by the very first Sonic The Hedgehog – a game that had to tell its story through box art, advertising and the bleeding instruction manual. Most 2D platformers at least aim to explain to the player why they are spending hours jumping on enemies and running to the right. Sonic Generations, released in 2011, doesn’t really bother. To its credit, though, it doesn't feature any human-hedgehog romance.

In spite of the fact that this narrative problem does not seem to be getting any better (the latest Sonic game introduced an antagonist called Infinite whose entire gimmick was wearing a helmet), it does not seem to have lost its place in the minds of children. While Sonic the Hedgehog 2 sold 6 million units, Sonic Heroes still topped 3 million. Even today, in the face of competition from Fortnite, Minecraft, and all manner of social media accessible to children, Sonic still nets millions of sales and last year the franchise brought about the highest grossing video game film of all time. Why are kids still playing games that don’t make any sense, given how much the industry has progressed since Sonic first jumped on the scene in ’91? And why are so many adults still tagging along for the ride?

The short answer is: suspension of disbelief. As children, we enjoy a much higher tolerance for incomprehensible nonsense. We let things glide over us even if they don’t make complete sense, and we don’t pause to try and employ the dialectic method drilled into us through essay writing and exam questions. The phrase “everyone’s a critic” actually went on to say “except children under the age of 11”. As a child, spending most of your spare time throwing up your imagination in one way or another, you're more inclined to give the content you consume the leeway you also give yourself. You can latch onto the motifs and the mottos of a piece of media and grow to love it, even if the story at its centre is total guff. But it’s much harder to do that as an adult (maybe it is easier if you are drinking a Flemish lager at the same time).

Nowadays, when the light is good enough in the afternoons, I walk along the old canal. It was abandoned decades ago, but it has only recently silted up and fallen into algal bloom. I used to walk there as a young child, parents in tow, on the way to the playground. I could convince myself I was in another world, this emerald glade of still water, brimming with wildlife and straddled by reeds. It was just another suspension of disbelief. I would wile away summers’ days imagining other bits and bobs to make the playground more exciting, until I was told to come home again. And then I would sit on the awful sofa and boot up the Xbox, and my dad would come in and watch for a while. On occasion he would play guitar. On occasion he would join in. I pestered him to help me beat that airship. He erred; said he didn’t know any better than me. That must have required a major suspension of disbelief on his part.

I beat the airship on my own time and watched the metal hedgehog melt into a frog or vice versa. I didn’t pretend to understand it. And when my dad took his guitar and left the room, I didn’t think about when he would do it for the final time. But that's the sort of disbelief you can suspend as long as you like.