Since the series appears to be revitalizing in recent years, I want to discuss the possibility of adapting Sonic's alternate media plotlines to video games.

Specifically, I'm interested in 90's Sonic media as a testing ground for more  games based on Sonic comics, cartoons, and movies going forward.

The 1-to-1 adaptational failure is the oldest trick in the book, we know. We're not looking for Street Fighter: the Movie, the game. What we should be doing is learning from the most successful subseries on the market right now: Generations. There is a piqued consumer interest in games like Generations and Mania which revitalize classic concepts and storylines with modern gameplay.

Formatting the gameplay similarly is kind of easy in that each canon can be its own hub world which allows you to play a sample of courses and characters from that media. The more rewarding approach would probably take the form of a reboot incorporating every canon from the chosen breadth into one seamless gameplay experience. It's far easier to ruin the latter, but to attempt something like this at all, I'd make it as ambitious as possible.

I had this idea late last year when I realized that none of the Sonic cartoons of old were adapted to games. This is a shame because one of my earliest memories of the series was in a Denny's or IHOP promotion for Sonic Underground that made it seem like I was really missing out.

I left a comment to this effect on the rare Sonic Underground video that allows them, and that would have been well with me for the foreseeable future if it weren't for another piece of Sonic's buried history: the Tornado. We don't know anything about his plane in the main canon, and by extension, we don't know anything about Sonic. He's a canonically seasoned aviator, yet not even his own Wiki page seems aware of that, let alone the games.

The '92 grade school manga sponsored by Sega is the one piece of media I know of that connects Sonic to the Tornado. In this canon, Sonic's real name is Nicky, and his dad is named Paulie, an air mail carrier. Needless to say, the games had already been going by this point, so there was never any time to explain these things. We just hopped straight into one whirlwind Sonic adventure after another.

If we could do it all again, I'd have no problem rebuilding the canon from the boy named Nicky and Paulie, his pilot dad. But I'm just one fan, you know?

Alt-media games and a possible reboot