Hogfather looks at what's up with the games' timelines.

There has been a long debate for now as to an order or a structured canon for the sonic games. Which come in order? Which are correct? And which should be discarded? Hopefully I can answer some of those questions. But I shall also aim to leave it open for others to take further in the future for future releases. Here I have looked at all the big sonic games and discovered that a single line canon is not the answer. The Sonic games are too complex and too different from each other to categorise into one single list that is an order of the events like human history.

For now let us forget ALL handheld games, these are your game gear, DS and GBAs for now. (Mainly because I haven’t played them all so I cant accurately place them on it. But anyone else has feel free to make your own article later...

The games I've chosen for my continuity/reality timeline thing are ones that I'm both very familiar with and ones which seem to greatly follow onto one another.

I hope this will work on a 1 dimensional piece of media, try to use your imaginations here (it'll help if you think about films like Back to the Future and Terminator).

Think right now about the life you live. In your own world the timeline of which you lead will appear to you as this…

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One straight line with no way to change it.

However we all make decisions which affect the course of our lives, Imagine for a moment that at one quarter through that line you are faced with a decision such as… do I take the bus? Or do I walk to town? Whichever you chose you will experience one set of events no matter how uneventful. However what if you chose the other option? You will experiences a different set of events. And once you reach your destination because of the choice your future actions are affected e.g. how tired you are, body temperature, any contacts you made and if because of the time differences of the two the weather changed. All affect what you do… two separate roads.

Now consider this further. Imagine that the events you choose remain constant forever; there is no possibility to change. But the world around you is different such as the technological level of human society; the government was of a different calibre etc.

When you apply this theory of an alternative reality or timeline to Sonic games you begin to notice that there are at least three different timelines and realities. Each one has their unique characteristics that remain constant. Whilst all appear similar they are very different, however the history and events in each are near identical. However because of the nature of our own reality and Sonic games being released one after another they appear to belong to 1 timeline, however as I shall explain whilst they all follow a linier journey they are not all apart of the same reality.

Picture 3 lines for now as follows…

Now in each of these timelines imagine a Sonic game arrives followed by its sequel. That would look like this…

(All these time lines are running at the same time so when a Sonic game arrives in one timeline it also appears in the other timeline)

For now the games I’ve chosen to focus on shall be registered as follows…

S1 = Sonic 1
S2 = Sonic 2
S3 = Sonic 3.
SCD = Sonic CD
S3D = Sonic 3D Flickies Island
CH = Chaotix
SD = Shadow the hedgehog

(the rest shall be the universal abbreviations of titles)

Now if I place them onto the three timelines in the categories I’ve identified they appear in the following timelines/realities…

Now I shall explain what each reality means…

Lets look at reality 1. In that reality I put in all the games where any signs of humanity are virtually nil. In that reality one could argue successfully that it's set on a place called Mobius. In this reality we also had the first generation of Sonic fans, those who had a good old Sega Megadrive up until the 32X came and went.

In reality 2 I put in there the adventure series as well as Shadow and Sonic riders. Sonic adventure1/2 the reason was simple whilst in Sonic adventure there are references to the previous games including sonic CD due to the locations being so dramatically different and all of a sudden humans are everywhere and it looks like it's on a totally different planet than before... and also my mum said. What! How did they advance that quickly!? And she doesn’t come onto the net and sonic sites like I do... so she's not privy to any information except that given in the games.

Anyway... Whilst Sonic adventure seems to continue from Sonic and Knuckles (sine sonic and knuckles can be related back to sonic 3 and sonic 3 back to sonic 2 etc...) in that it references past events. But because of how in both design of the characters and the new locations as well as the human population can it possibly be set on the same world that we experienced during the 16bit-32X era?

Lets now look at the real world shall we? Most people who had a megadrive stuck with a megadrive, and likewise those with a SNES stuck with a SNES. due to the price of consoles it was rare for 1 child to have both. But these consoles had a long life when you look at the length a console tends to have before the upgrade appears... however the age of those original fans was now different...

From Sonic 1-S3D/CH it's around 5-6 years (looking at the console life not time between games) that means than in that time children born when the first Sonic game came out would then be around 5/6 years old and thus we have a new gaming generation influenced by different pop tastes and culture looking at new designs and being influenced by new art forms.

So we people who are now in our late teens and early 20s could be said to be apart of the reality 1, primarily. Because we experienced the first games and we made our own rules from the in game media as well as television and the comics.

But this new generation that came is now wondering which console they should by... be it a Saturn? Playstation? N64? And we too are looking to move on but we have prior knowledge when it comes to Sonics storyline.

The next Sonic game to arrive that was a big game would have been Sonic R. Now I haven’t included it onto my timelines (mainly because I’ve not played it well enough) But I imagine that it would probably fit on either reality 1 or reality 3 (I'll explain reality 3 in a moment).

Now because the saturn was a dead time for Sonic, only a select few could play Sonic Fighters at Sega world and Sonic Jam wasn’t going to appeal to the younger end of gamers simply because it had "bad graphix!" when compared to the urm... 3D?... games of the time.

So now from those newborns that were born during the time of Sonic 1 it's been nearly.... 9 years from Sonic 1 till Sonic adventure. So the second generation is now approximately 9/10 years old... and the first generation is now... Approximately 14-16 years old... Whilst the first generation who is still interested in Sonic Sega knows that the money is found not in the first generation... but in the second... and the third generation (those kids aged around 4-6)...

this is where reality 2 comes in. In this reality we get Sonic adventure. Sonic adventure is a great game for someone who hasn’t played Sonic before. It explains almost every character as well as offering a basic back story that the second generation and third generation can grasp and fill in the blanks... However for the first generation who is aware of past Sonic games this game is somewhat confusing. There are trace elements of the original story there, but the main storyline of Sonic adventure contradicts what they know. (e.g. some levels being set in wrong locations, the inclusion of humans, huge city landscapes, Earth references.)

Now whilst before we have always thought, there are multiple universes e.g. fleetway, archie, SatAM, Sega sonic.

We have rarely considered alternative realities.

Consider this for a moment...

Take the game resident evil. nearly the entire storyline including the spinoffs work perfectly as one single storyline. Even with Resident Evil 0 it works all the way up until resident evil 4. And whilst some may argue there’s a spinoff or two, there is one definitive chain of events, a linier chronology that doesn’t detract from previous events.

However Final Fantasy is a series that takes place not only on separate planets but possibly in separate time periods to another. e.g. FF9 could be set before ff7 but at the same time as FF8. And some including myself have argued that FFX/X-2 are set both before FF7, but are on the same planet as FF7. (But that’s for another topic)

Here in Sonic we have a series which is in it's way chronological to Resident Evil but is easier to explain if you take aspects from final fantasy.

For instance. Say that in reality 1, we experienced those events as gamers, but in reality 2 there was a Sonic 1, Sonic 2, Sonic 3 etc. And in Reality 3 there was also a Sonic 1,2,3 etc. But they were not exactly the same.

But we as the gamer because of segas desire to appeal and evolve the series for the younger gamer and appeal to their tastes it cannot keep the same events or design as it once had. Especially since it began on systems were in game detail was limited. Therefore as a gamer we act almost as a time machine/Tardis (for dr who fans) traversing through the realities with each new game or into the future of the same timeline... (Still with me? good. if not... go watch the Christopher eccleson season of doctor who, mainly the episodes set on satellite 5).

If you’re still confused have a look at this image…

Now if you’ll recall the image from earlier you’ll notice that now I’ve added a red line to join up the different games. Now it becomes clearer. Imagine for now that the red line represents each game that we get. In other words the red life represents our life playing the games. We unlike Sonic can travel to different realities and see the experiences in these alternative realities.

I’ll try to explain this better.

So we began in reality 1 and then after a long run we then hopped in the Tardis and went to reality 2. Whilst it seemed the same it wasn’t, there were differences, but we as people were smart enough to say yeah it's different but we can see that there was a continuation of a story, although in places it doesn’t quite match, yet if we had spent the entire time in reality 2 it would have made sense (this is the second generation, they don’t know of the first reality but were given nearly the same info as us to get a similar backstory)

So what about reality 3 then?

Well reality 3 is a bit of an odd one, The games I placed there in my opinion do not fit in reality 1 or reality 2. but in another reality entirely. Whilst they contain elements in the design of the near early like environment of reality 2, they also contain huge barren/natural field like elements of reality 1. But what’s important about Reality 3 is that it appears to be on par with a human society in decline and going through either an extinction or apocalypse, this is shown though the lack of humans/society and destroyed cities.

In reality 3 I feel that very soon this shall become the start of the third/fourth generations experience of Sonic. Sonic Next so far has from what we have seen gone back to it's original roots, we've seen natural landscapes with no sign of a human civilisation like we've seen in the adventure series and shadow and riders.... But... Sonics design is very much like the adventure style, furthermore the level designs are similar to that of those games listed in reality 2 and we've seen elements of reality 2 in there also. e.g. the egg carrier and the ring boxes.

Sonic 2006. From the new trailer released and new images of the game (it hasn’t been released yet) we have seen both elements of reality 1 and reality 2. However from the city levels we’ve seen the city is in decay. The city resembles that of a nuclear war. We saw in shadow the city get destroyed by the Black Aliens, however so far in this game we have seen no trace of living humans other than Robotnik/Eggman and the princess. Due to the screens we’ve seen of the city depicting robots on the streets launching rockets and firing guns as well as burning fires it falls in reality 3, the recovering apocalypse. This can also be seen in recently acquired footage showing Sonic and Silver running through a city that’s totally destroyed and is still burning. However it does show a human population in a small village area indicating that the world is recovering from an apocalypse.

Sonic Rivals. So far all we’ve seen are purely natural levels. Therefore it has to fall in reality 1. However it’s order cannot be decided yet due to the lack of information. But the game will come after SA2 but has the potential of being there before shadow.

Sonic Wild Fire. It’s hard to say right now. There are elements of a Arabian civilisation but it’s too early to say. Therefore this shall have to be kept for another time.

The Shadow problem. With the inclusion of Shadow the Hedgehog (the game) came a problem. In this game there are over 300 paths which lead to 10 endings however only 1 path and 1 ending can be correct. As of yet there is no clear path which is correct, until Sonic 2006 comes out here is no way to know for sure and maybe there will never be a way to know for sure. However we have to assume that in the final story, all the events prior either do not matter or all are correct. But in the final story all the events are real and will carry on. This means that all dialogue in the final story and the planets condition shall be carried on. This means that we see Black Doom destroy what’s left of the city which represents human civilisation in Sonic games.

Now here we have something interesting. At the start of shadow during its opening movie we see a city and an environment very similar to that found in the adventure series. However from the moment the Black Aliens invade it becomes an apocalyptic setting. Does this mean that Shadow is a game which fits in between realities, that it’s apart of a fourth reality? Or even a new one? We cannot tell yet. The answer to that lies within Sonic 2006. However I included it in Reality 2 because it has elements of the adventure series and shows a human civilisation at the second before it began to decline and be turned into an apocalypse.

Whilst the order should be the order in which Sega released the games (there should be 1 or two exceptions i.e. heroes and one of the advance games) with the different realities you should get a clearer idea as to what the Sonic canon should look like.

I thank you for reading.