The trailer for the Sonic the Hedgehog movie has proven to be more than even the most committed Sonic porn artists could have hoped for. Over the course of three captivating minutes, expectations were shattered as the bat creature made famous by the Weekly World News made his debut in a major motion picture, a stunning and lifelike representation of the blue rodent that made fans question whether the movie was real-life and real-life is the videogame.
This has been a long time coming for the Sonic the Hedgehog media property. The franchise has been most commonly hailed for its long-running series of videogames, praised for an emphasis on speed that was backed with complex, sprawling levels and vibrant visuals. But as the videogame zeitgeist pushed two-dimensional game worlds to the wayside, it’s become increasingly obvious the franchise’s greatest achievement has been its exhaustive storytelling and lore, a collaborative effort detailing both the physical and sexual exploits of the Sega mascot.
For the last last three decades, Sonic creator Yuji Naka has collaborated with both corporations and children all across the internet to painstakingly manage and construct the increasingly complicated Sonic canon, spanning several floors of archival beneath the Sega headquarters in Tokyo, Japan, along with computer hard drives all across the planet, an increasingly complicated endeavor that has required the the efforts of overworked dump truck drivers, transporting design documents from one landfill into another.
It’s why the expectations of the movie are not to be understated. Dedicated fans of the Sonic franchise have been demanding a story arc that ties the entire universe together, wondering how the seemingly inconsistent events of Sonic Spinball could be rectified with original fan creations like Sonicetta or Coldsteel the Hedgehog, wondering whether Sonic and Bugs Bunny will finally team up to join forces against the trolls, and wondering why I keep falling through the environments in the 2006 videogame.
Much of this may seem familiar to those on the cutting-edge of film, currently centered around superheroes whose stories build an interconnected whole, but inside sources suggest it has always been Sega’s plan to create a narrative consisting of dozens of videogames, television shows, and comic books, all culminating in this movie, to be the “endgame” of Sonic.
Unlike the recent slate of big-budget blockbuster movies, however, which have followed the mostly conventional formula of projecting a filmstrip onto a large canvas in order to simulate the illusion of moving pictures and sound, it has become apparent that Sonic the Hedgehog is going to represent a phase shift in the human condition.
On the way there, we need to thank the corporate board types who had no familiarity with Sonic and assumed they were making a movie franchise based on a fast food company, or perhaps the basketball team that used to play in Seattle. It takes guts to stake increased year-to-year operating revenues on the fundamental questions of metaphysical consciousness that will be addressed in the film, providing opportunities to market human art to sentient quasars and supercharged turbomatter.
So even as the trailer ignites discussions all across the planet and the film is mere months away from distribution, teams of engineers and theoretical scientists are constructing applications, tools, and modes of thinking to deal with the problems inherent to the creation of the Sonic the Hedgehog film, ensuring that Yuji’s vision is properly converted to what humans and other entities perceive and understand to be physical space.
Sources are sketchy due to the nature of the Sonic film’s creation, but the few individuals who have returned to our universe with their full mental faculties suggest the film will not only appeal to more conventional audiences, but even committed speedrunning types who have gained complete control of the ones and zeroes that provide the foundation for our universe.
The earliest drafts of the script, consisting of billions of lines of computer code, suggests that Sonic will fight Dr. Robotnik, and that the film will be carefully tailored for tens of millions of psychological profiles, all accounting for the endless number of potential game states that could be perceived or considered the Sonic canon, a master of inclusive storytelling and writing that will break boundaries across race, gender, skill, and those who have over fifty rings at the time they enter the theater.
But the movie will also be a celebration of Sega’s software and hardware history, and already, the creators have hinted at the possibility that all versions of the movie, including streaming media formats, will be compatible with the Sonic and Knuckles game cartridge, allowing long-time fans of the series to witness alternative sequences and timelines that will not be a part of the “official theatrical release”.
The ultimate goal is to create a game that is not only suitable for consumption inside of human movie theaters, but across home formats spanning the entire history and catalogue of Sega hardware and software, celebrating over half-a-century of business, using lossless codecs that will allow hardcore Sega fans to stream the film using the dialup function on their Dreamcast.
So while the videogame industry has spoken for years of “interactive movies”, spanning all the way back to games like Dragon’s Lair and today’s Uncharted series, it goes without saying that the Sonic the Hedgehog “film” is the first TRUE interactive movie, accounting for all permutations of the known universe on the path to delivering a cinematic simulacrum.
While future events are always uncertain, it seems that new technologies will have to be invented in the coming months so human beings can process the gravitas and scathing wit of this inevitable masterpiece, allowing individuals to assume different forms of consciousness and neural input as they watch the film through competing subjective realities.
But it is precisely the genius of the film-makers that these techniques are being sold to the public as “cheap computer graphics”, with the director of the film brilliantly claiming they will make adjustments due to the “negative feedback”. These merely disguise the ground-breaking scientific and film-making techniques, most of which Sega refuses to reveal to the public, and some of which have already triggered Geiger counters hundreds of miles away from the studio.
The evacuation of mainland Japan due to what scientists believe may be “multiple concurrent nuclear meltdowns” is likely to be one of the many exciting moments in the movie’s marketing campaign, a celebration not just of the Sonic universe, but our own universe and very much the human condition. Whether or not the actual release of the film causes the heat death of the universe remains to be seen, but this epic tale of furry, human-like characters fucking each other with all manner and size of dick should be coming hard sometime in November 2019.