The subtle genius of opening stages in Sonic

[Blacklightning]

Hi, so uh, I'm kinda bad at explaining thread concepts. But since I started genuinely exploring game design I started to gain new insight and a new appreciation for the way games are designed on a psychological level - whether to teach players without explicitly pointing out they're being taught, or to visually separate layers of their design, or just to engage primal feelings of pleasure and success in ways that might not even be directly linked to succeeding or progressing. I wanted to take a while to reflect on a few of them that occur right from the start of a game, even if just in the classic trilogy, that have been occupying my thoughts lately. I'd love to hear your takes on other games and zones too!

GREEN HILL ZONE

When people are asked to name what they found most memorable Green Hill, most people reference the first loop-de-loop. It's not hard to see why. Building up the speed to defy gravity was - and still is - a pretty novel application of game mechanics that doesn't get explored often, and the common loop is one of the most famous ways to demonstrate that visually. In spite of that, though, I feel like its importance in Sonic 1 is grossly overstated. While yes it does form a roadblock that teaches players that some obstacles will require a buildup of speed to progress that you might not necessarily get from a standing start, as a teaching tool it truly pales in comparison to the humble and often overlooked S curve.

The big thing about Sonic games of old - and something that might not actually be self-evident to people picking up Sonic for the first time, especially back when this game was first released - is that rolling is really fucking important. It's something you might not even know how to do if you don't have the manual for it. Because while running downhill self-evidently speeds you up, rolling downhill produces a fuckload more speed if you're willing to place your trust in the level design. Green Hill's S curve demonstrates pretty succinctly that this is a thing you can do simply by automatically curling you up as you enter it and then preserving that rolling state as you exit it, not only proving that you can get a ridiculous amount of speed this way but also that you don't even need the pipe to do it, either immediately demonstrating to a player how to do it or simply cluing them in that it's possible at all and leaving them enough information to eventually replicate it for themselves.

What's more, that curve also leads to a quarter pipe further down, demonstrating the payoff of gaining that much speed by launching you really fucking high up into the air into a cloud of rings. Then with a small amount of practice or luck, you can end up hitting a monitor or a badnik on the way down and bounce back up again, also demonstrating that landing on something from great height will return pretty much exactly the height you fell from. This entire process takes at most six seconds in real time, and during those scant six seconds, manages to put nearly the entire depth of Sonic 1's mechanics on show singlehandedly.

And it really makes me so sad that Sega / ST consistently misunderstands the genius of this one simple curve, even when repeatedly recreating it verbatim in later GHZ reprises - so much so that they have to line the tube with invisible boost pads just to make sure Sonic can actually make it through it all the way in one go without getting stuck.

 

EMERALD HILL ZONE

I feel like this is slowly becoming less and less common knowledge thanks to a lot of the compilations and remakes the classics have been getting, but Sonic 2 was actually the first appearance of the spindash in the series - later rereleases merely added it to Sonic 1 as a quality of life feature. So Sonic 2 - specifically Emerald Hill - had some pretty big shoes to fill for those experiencing it for the very first time. Especially since Sonic 2 makes pretty big use of curves that basically REQUIRE the spindash to ascend, and there isn't exactly a succinct way to demonstrate how to perform one without some kind of button prompt or tutorial. Now as far as EHZ is concerned, there are actually two notable ways it attempts to demonstrate this to the player, and neither of them actually involve the level design in any way bar to emphasize that a slope is too steep to climb simply by running up it. The first one is easily the more memorable of the two to me, for the simple reason that it's presented to you by not even playing the game.

No, I'm serious.

Attract Modes are something of a lost art nowadays as far as videogames are concerned, one of those things existed purely because of the limitations of a system and had no reason to exist once consoles became advanced enough to display actual video files instead. In lieu of that, many earlier games relied simply on pre-recording player inputs to let the game quite literally play itself for a short amount of time to show off, and it's pretty easy to set off by accident by gawking at the title screen for more than a few seconds (don't lie, you let it happen too and were never disappointed that you did). On first boot, the first replay shown is always a two player playthrough of Emerald Hill, and at the 0:35 mark, Sonic can be seen encountering and immediately solving a conundrum a normal player might otherwise have - seeing a slope too tall to climb, demonstrating that it is indeed unclimbable, then coming to a complete stop, clearly and visibly crouching, and then performing a certain input to rev up and speed off. Funnily enough, while I personally don't like the focus on using a single button for everything that classic Sonics employed and continue to employ, even I can't deny that this played into its exact strengths - because since everything used one button, there was no possible doubt as to what that certain input could be.

Likewise, the AI Tails can help with pretty similar reasoning, even if I'm not 100% sure of what in its programming actually triggers it. Whenever Tails does decide to perform a spindash, all the movements are slow and deliberate, from the stopping to the crouching to the revving, putting a distinct emphasis on each step in such a way that it visibly separates them and allows pretty much any player the chance to observe and mimic them. Maybe there is some part of this that is effectively random and can't be counted on to appear in every run, especially not this early, but yknow what? I'm including it anyway, because I'm still convinced there was an obvious intent behind that level of separation that tied into all of this.

ANGEL ISLAND

This is going to be a quick and simple one, but I don't think it's any less important for it. Because up until now, Special Stages had been presented as completely unmissable elements of any given stage - the goal in Sonic 1, and the checkpoint starposts in Sonic 2. Sonic 3 was the game that introduced giant rings as entrances to special stages, and with that, actually going out of their way to conceal them inside of the level geometry instead of out in the open. And out of context, looking through the eyes of a beginner player, it's tempting to ask "how the fuck is one supposed to know that shit even exists, much less that you have to walk through walls to find them?".

And the answer is pretty simple - by making exactly one of them unmissable. Just by starting Act 2 and going through the tube you'll almost certainly crash right through the wall to uncover one. Even if you panic and jump early to miss the breakable portion of the wall, you'll still see the giant ring on the other side as you fall. And that's all it really takes to ignite the fleeting curiousity needed to start hunting the rest of them down where otherwise it would have been a mechanic a player could have gone an entire playthrough without discovering at all. And consequently, I'm sure, the main reason why going left after the first cliff fall is deeply ingrained in the muscle memory of every player who returned to this game since.

MUSHROOM HILL ZONE

Yes fuck you I'm counting Sonic 3 and Knuckles separately, because MHZ is pretty much the reason I wanted to explore this topic. It's subtleties may not necessarily be all learning curve related like the others, but my appreciation for it is deeply personal in nature - driven in part by being literally my first experience with Sonic, and in part by an absolutely absurd fluke.

See, I actually managed to soft lock this game when I first rented it from a Video Ezy. You might be tempted to think that would lend this game a pretty sour impression, if not for the exact place I managed to break it - one of the swing sets, placed overhanging a convenient half pipe. Normally the game will lock your camera position while swinging and then release it again when you let go, but for whatever reason the camera permanently locked in place even after I let go and never returned again. But that never really deterred me, because even with the game completely broken, this single swing is still absolutely mesmerizing. It took me quite a few long years to really come back to it and comprehend why: there's something truly visceral about an element of a level that responds to EXACTLY the amount of force you put into it, and much like the S curve from GHZ earlier, it's a lost art that Sonic games consistently fail to replicate both as level gimmicks and in standard movement mechanics. If you just walk into it the swing just gently sways, if you full pelt spindash into it you can do several full loops off of it, and you can even choose the angle of your launch by carefully timing your angle as you let go.

I mean absolutely no hyperbole when I say that this single screen of a broken Sonic game with just a single swing on it brought me more enjoyment than several entire other games, including other Sonic games. And Mushroom Hill Zone is filled to the fucking brim with mechanics that respond in much the same way by carefully considering the amount of energy you put into them - no more, and no less. How about those horizontal pipes you can launch into from below to boost your height with a quick swing, but only if you already enter them with velocity to spare? And you just hang from them otherwise? The seesaws that you can pull down on to make it ascend, but it ascends a shorter distance if you only slightly pull on it, and you can even make it ascend faster if you manage to make Tails grab onto the other hook? Even the vines that root you in place, normally a nuisance, still have a directly equal and opposite effect on your movement until you learn that you can spindash out of it.

So many things in this single zone, including a fucking Badnik, exist specifically to either challenge your exact momentum or give an alternate use for it, and act in direct accordance to exactly how much you put in. There are some other Sonic games that don't even have a fucking concept of momentum, let alone stage gimmicks that use it, diluting the entire depth of their playstyle to Fast, Not Fast and Not Moving - sometimes quite literally, if you pay close attention to how classic Sonic controls in Forces. And in my personal opinion, MHZ is the peak of everything a classic Sonic game should strive to be, despite being woefully underrated as far as the original zones go. Compare and contrast to many, many other later zones which present their gimmicks as Just A Spring By Any Other Name, or to gameplay mechanics of other Sonic games which just ignore acceleration completely and set your speed to a static value, and it's hard not to wish we had it better.

[Maple Syrup]

Man. The first stages were easy and fun.