Dec 14

Dec 14 Ash Schofield's Many Christmases With Sonic Generations | Winter Spectacular 2024

Sonic Generations is timeless. Not just due to being literally set outside of time, but mainly thanks to holding the title of ‘best Sonic game’ for an astoundingly long time. With excellent level design in both its Modern and Classic styles, its a genuinely loving celebration of the hedgehog's history, and its still-thriving modding scene that has extended its life far beyond its original release in 2011 is testament to that. Generations isn't going to be forgotten any time soon. But I’m not here just to gush about how incredible of a game it is, as much as I certainly could; I’m here to write somewhat self-indulgently and get to the soft, gooey core of why it means so much to me and, weirdly enough, my relationship with my dad.

The ghosts (hedgehogs?) of Christmas past and present.

My time with Generations began on a Christmas morning around my early teens, receiving a brand new Xbox 360 copy from my parents; I was filled with utter childlike wonder at the prospect of playing the newest Sonic game when it was still the newest… and on a console that wasn’t a PS2 at that! Although I was but a wee teen and hadn’t yet played a lot of the series, I still found joy in recognising Green Hill, Seaside Hill and Rooftop Run from my previous, slightly scattered adventures with the hedgehog. Of course, nostalgia alone isn’t enough; what really made Generations last for me was its endless replayability. Sure, there are only 18 Acts, but each one is a challenge to replay over and over as you find its Red Rings and achieve the elusive S rank. Although one could stop there, there’s something magnetic about its level design that drives you to keep replaying stages to shave off a few seconds each time. Long before I fell in love with the fighting game genre, optimising combos and conversions till the sun goes down, Generations was the first game that made me really want to put in the time to get better at it. I don’t have any proven record of how many times I’ve replayed Rooftop Run Act 2 alone, but it’s got to be in the thousands by now.

At the risk of a copyright claim from Dog’s Trust, Sonic Generations really isn’t just for Christmas, and it’s remained a consistent part of my life ever since, bearing an abstract positive association with the holidays as a result. Moving from the Xbox 360 to Steam let me discover a whole landscape of incredible fan-made mods, from the bewilderingly high-effort Unleashed Project to the practically one-to-one Real Shadow mod (more on him later), breathing life into an already fantastic game and creating entirely new experiences so many years later. When I say ‘many Christmases’, I really do mean it: every year without fail, I wound up playing at least a few runs of my favourite stages around the festive period. While there are many games that have been core to my life through various stages of it, nothing has stuck around as long as this one. Despite Generations’ ongoing place in my past and present, it was far from my first brush with the hedgehog. While Heroes and Unleashed were some of my most played games on the PS2, it all started much earlier.

Sega’s dreams of blast processing circa 1991, finally realised.

One of my first memories with my dad was playing Sonic The Hedgehog on an actual Mega Drive; I’m fairly sure it was the first video game I ever played. Being a young child, I often struggled with the game’s fast pace and platforming challenges, especially when it came to death traps like Scrap Brain Zone. At times like these, had my dad been in the room with me, he would offer to take over and try to get past the hard part for me. Not being an avid gamer himself, he wouldn’t necessarily make it through on his first try, but what mattered was having him there as a kind and helpful figure in my time of (simulated) struggle. This came full circle upon my dad checking in on me midway through a run of Green Hill Act 1 in Generations - a modern, HD recreation of a memory we shared on the Mega Drive - and musing “Wow, that looks a lot better than the old Sonic!”

While Sonic Generations is a bright and joyous celebration of the blue blur’s colourful past, experienced by not one but two Sonics, 2024’s Shadow Generations contrastingly tasks Shadow with experiencing and reflecting on the many miseries of his past, and ultimately moving on from them with the knowledge there is nothing he can do to change them. Despite having defeated his biological, alien warlord father in Shadow the Hedgehog, somehow Black Doom returned. Hoping to finally rid Shadow of his free will and make him into the weapon he was always meant to be, Black Doom constantly reminds Shadow of his dark, vengeful origins. This occurs not just through his father literally telling him what he’s supposed to be over and over, but specifically through corrupting Shadow’s past; Space Colony ARK, Rail Canyon and Sunset Heights suddenly fall to pieces midway through Shadow’s re-experiencing of his past, with interstellar bases and apocalyptic suburbs all contorting into the high-speed metropolis of Radical Highway.

Outside of it presumably being his favourite stage from Sonic Adventure 2, there’s a good reason Black Doom keeps taking Shadow back to Radical Highway. Being Shadow’s first playable appearance in the series, it’s arguably his ‘Green Hill Zone’ - in a meta sense, it’s where he was born. Yet unlike Sonic’s whimsical journey to save Flickies and take down the cartoonish Eggman, Shadow’s genesis was predicated on one goal: power up the ARK’s Eclipse Cannon and destroy the Earth itself in return for GUN’s unjust murder of Maria Robotnik, the only loved one the black and red hedgehog ever had. Radical Highway was Shadow’s first introduction to the Earth, and his father is desperate for him to relive all of the trauma, rage and revenge it symbolises and regress on the growth he’s made since then.

Shadow’s character has always centered around just what his purpose in life is, and the differing ideals the many parties involved in his creation had for who he should be. His biological father, Black Doom, wanted him to be the ultimate weapon for his army; his real father, Gerald Robotnik, wanted him to be the ultimate life form capable of healing both his granddaughter and the world, and his closest loved one, Maria Robotnik, just wanted him to love and be loved. As she says to him in White Space - “Do you know why I named you Shadow? Because without light, there is only darkness; but a shadow will show you where to find the light.” Over time, Shadow has finally come to realise that his past is what made him the person he is today, and only he can choose who he is.

Upon finally seeing Maria again in this space outside time after a decade of mourning her, Shadow is desperate to take this opportunity to change the past, saving her and her grandfather from their inevitable fate. He cherishes the borrowed time he is granted with them, but it’s just that: borrowed. With Black Doom’s destiny for him denied and his father defeated once more, the temporal anomaly that brought Maria and Gerald here begins to break down as they return to their original point in time and slowly fade into the ether. Shadow panics, hopelessly planning to use Chaos Control to deny reality and make this moment last forever - desperate not to lose Maria for the second time. Yet she is the one to stop him, accepting what they must all come to terms with, reminding him that “We don’t want to be frozen in one place in time”. Shadow despairingly retorts “But you don’t know what’s going to happen!”, knowing himself that her fate is sealed upon her return. As she accepts what must happen, she reminds him of an eternal truth, the truth that lets people and memories live forever regardless of change or the passage of time: “I will always be in your heart.”

My relationship with my dad has changed a lot since the days of him watching me play Generations, let alone the days of him helping me complete Sonic the Hedgehog. ; We’ve both changed in the time since; I’ve found out quite a lot about myself that we don’t see eye to eye on, including the pretty major realisation of being a woman. We’ve drifted apart not just in the natural progression of childhood to adulthood, but in our ideals not lining up as I gradually self-actualise. While I truly believe he had solely the best intentions for me when I was younger and easier to accept as his child, I’m aware the way my life has progressed has made me less and less of the child he had come to know and love. I’d be lying if I said I wish things hadn’t turned out differently, but some things just have to be. I have to be the person I am, even if it means no longer being what some people want me to be.

Due to factors both in and outside of these changes, this upcoming Christmas will be the first I spend without my family, instead spending it with my closest friend in the world - my found family, if you can forgive the slight cliche. The experience of family Christmas has been an exercise in pretending to be someone else for several years, and something had to change eventually. Sonic Generations continues to be a part of my festive season, a truth that has only increased with the addition of Shadow Generations - a story of finding your place within your world and accepting your past and present. What may be my brightest Christmas so far happens to come around the same time as the darker half of the game that has been with me all this time, and I find something special in that.

Time comes for us all, but that doesn’t mean the past never happened. It’s just a question of grounding yourself in the past and wishing things were different, or finding the light in that darkness and accepting that we can only live in the present.