Keep on dashin’.
Yesterday marked the 10th anniversary for Sonic Dash, SEGA HARDlight’s long running mobile action game. Team celebrated on Twitter, showing off an adorable Green Hill cake.
Sonic Dash launched in 2013 in an era shortly after mobile gaming’s early key players had established themselves, when the iPhone 5 was still fresh and new, and Android/Windows store releases didn’t quite have day-and-date parody yet. At launch, Sonic Dash was above all an arcade score attack game with only Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Amy Rose playable. Across the decade, Dash would balloon in its cast and features, adding dozens of new characters and skins, a new boss, new locations, an animal-collecting metagame, regular special events, and cross-promotional collaborations.
The game blossomed into a number of spin-offs and sequels, like Apple Arcade’s Sonic Dash+, the arcade machine Sonic Dash Extreme, and the short-lived Sonic Dash 2: Sonic Boom based on the Sonic Boom game and cartoon series. However, it’s most notable heir is Sonic Forces: Speed Battle, a game that turned Dash’s lane-based dodging and collecting into intense multiplayer races with frequent updates (and heavier monetization).
The legacy of Sonic Dash will ultimately be that it was the first truly big Sonic mobile game. While we older players might have dabbled in various ports and mini-games on our Nokia flip phones, nothing released prior had quite the same satisfaction or responsiveness as a lengthy run through Seaside Hill. It was, and still is, the mobile game that most effectively captures the whimsy and pace of Sonic, but in a tight, simple, uncomplicated package.
…even when it throws some COMPLETE AND ABSOLUTE [expletive] that I had no way to react to three minutes into my otherwise perfect run, and now I have to start a new run to get the rings I need to boost Cream up to max level, but that’s okay because I can get more tokens near the start anyway, and if I use Blaze, that’ll help me get the Pockys I need to unlock–