You've Never Played Sonic The Hedgehog (On The Master System)
[Retro Review] Reviewing Sonic The Hedgehog... in 8-Bit.
Sonic The Hedgehog needs no introduction; in 3 days (or 1 if you’re in the PAL regions) the IP turns 35 and I can’t help but pay my respects to this franchise.
Sega’s anthropomorphic blue eulipotyphla (there’s a word nobody has written in a game review before) has sold millions of video games across his 3 decade history and while the blue blur has some real stinkers under his belt I’m firmly against the common internet opinion that Sonic wasn’t ever any good; the original trilogy + Knuckles and Sonic CD are some of the finest 2D platformers ever made and the Sonic Adventure games, while not as influential or beloved as Super Mario 64, are still a pair of thoroughly enjoyable 3D platformers that I hold a lot of nostalgia for.
I’ve not gotten around to Frontiers yet but everything I’ve heard suggests that’s a fun Sonic game too.
If you’re around my age then I can almost guarantee that your first encounter with classic Sonic was on the Sonic Gems Collection and Sonic Mega Collection for GameCube, these contained basically every notable Sonic game released up to that point bar Adventures 1 and 2; combined with the Sega Mega Drive Collection on PS2, these cemented my love not only for the blue hedgehog but for Sega as a whole. Even with Sega gone from the hardware business I turned up my nose at Mario as a kid: I swore that Mario had nothing on Sonic and would rewatch my Sonic Underground VHS tapes over and over combined with Sonic X on Jetix (there’s a name you’ve not heard in 20 years) I was a soldier in a console war that my side had already lost.
Those from a generation or two before me might have experienced Sonic at home on his native Mega Drive (for the sake of my own sanity in this article, I’ll only be referring to the Mega Drive by its original name, used here in the PAL regions and Japan and not by the name of Phil Collins’ band) and played with that wonderfully comfortable 3-button controller. You might have even owned Sonic Jam on the Saturn.
I’m willing to bet that almost none of you, save perhaps for my surprisingly large Brazilian subscriber base (olá amigos) experienced Sonic for the first time on the Sega Master System. “The Sega Master System?” You might be asking in the USA, with your car that turns like the Titanic and between mouthfuls of hamburger and bald eagle screeches. “What’s that?” The Master System was the NES’ competitor, it was good too: excellent, actually.
Nintendo used dodgy, manipulative tactics to strangle the SMS in the cot in the US market but in Europe and Brazil especially, this console did really well; it has better processing speeds, better graphics and in my opinion, a better controller than the NES and to the delight of a Saturn and Dreamcast owner like me, the Master System’s games are incredibly cheap. It was truly the NES’ equal.
Shortly after Sonic’s release on the Mega Drive in 1991, an 8-Bit version for Master System also found its way to shelves, many people prefer this version and many others claim it strips away what makes the game special. I don’t tend to cover the 8-Bit era on the Journal because it’s been done to death and I’m sick of the whole 80’s nostalgia thing but I’ve not seen a single article about this game on Substack and the Master System is an underrepresented console in general so this time? I’m happy to be the standard-bearer.
Eggsploiting Nature
Sonic The Hedgehog hails from a time where the video game spoke for itself: there is no opening cutscene or text crawl, just the welcoming jingle of your Master System…
and then it’s into the game. 1 D-pad, 2 buttons and a cartridge, gaming doesn’t get any purer than this.
The premise of 8-Bit Sonic The Hedgehog is the same as its 16-Bit counterpart on the Mega Drive: Dr. Robotnik (a doctor of what?) is harvesting the innocent wildlife of Sonic’s world and using them to power his robots. It’s up to -and I quote- ‘the real cool hedgehog with the spiked haircut’ to travel through the game’s 6 zones: Green Hill, Bridge, Jungle, Labyrinth, Scrap Brain and Sky Base, freeing the captured wildlife and defeating Robotnik wherever he rears his ugly head.
If -and I assume most people are- you’re familiar with Sonic’s Mega Drive outing then you might be scratching your head at that list of zones “Jungle? Bridge? Where is Spring Yard?” Well, that’s the best part of Master System Sonic: this isn’t some compromised demake like Out Run or Shinobi, neither is it a barely functional, over-aspirational 8-Bit title trying to be something beyond its technology, Sonic The Hedgehog on Master System is its entirely own game built from the ground up for the console sharing only a name, mechanics, premise and protagonist with its more well-known counterpart. If you buy this today, you’re not checking out a half-baked curiosity version of the original or an old-school oddity, this is a fully worthy entry in the series that stands on its own 2 feet.
Given this game is literally running off about half the processing power of the Sonic The Hedgehog you know and love you might expect the real goal of the game: collecting the Chaos Emeralds for the true ending, to be missing. Once again, you’d be wrong, in no way is 8-Bit Sonic half-baked.
It’s undeniable that much of Sonic’s attitude and the rebellious tone doesn’t survive the halving of Bits but the physics and animations here are impressively untouched and if you stop for long enough Sonic will still do that thing where he gets all testy and leers at the camera. I know I’m starting to sound like a broken vinyl but emphatically: it is all here, just not in the way you’re used to.
I’m Blue (Da Ba Dee)
In the introduction I mentioned that the Master System has ‘better graphics’ but it and the NES are both 8-Bit consoles, so what does that actually mean? Well, the Master System has a palette of 64 colours and can display 31 simultaneously on-screen; the NES had a colour palette around the same size but it could only display 25 simultaneously, this essentially makes the Master System library 6 colours more vibrant than Nintendo’s machine. That doesn’t sound like a lot but in-practice, games on this console can look stunning compared to those on the NES.
Getting back on topic, I mention all this because Sonic The Hedgehog tends to land in people’s top-10 best looking SMS games and for good reason: areas of this title look very appealing on a real CRT TV and when not played through an RF cable. Whenever I return to this game I’m always shocked how pristine Sonic’s sprite looks too; Mario on the NES looks like someone subjected him to taxidermy a week too late but Sonic? Look at him, he’s radiant blue.
![Sonic the Hedgehog (Master System): Green Hill Zone Act 2 [1080 HD]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tyqP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc65571f9-4fef-4faf-b485-9ceaa5752283_1280x720.jpeg "Sonic the Hedgehog (Master System): Green Hill Zone Act 2 [1080 HD]")
Yes folks, that is genuine transparency in an 8-Bit game, something that, to my knowledge, the NES was incapable of. It might be dithered so much it looks like a chess board (Sega Saturn fans reading that sentence) but for the standards of the time this is jaw-dropping to see on a home console.
A more impressive feat though is that nowhere in 8-Bit Sonic The Hedgehog will you see slow-down or flickering sprites besides when Sonic picks up a shield, where I assume it was intentional. There’s a lot of talk these days about games coming out broken or with glitches and how “It never used to be like this.” But let me tell you, as someone who plays these old consoles almost daily, games being broken was the norm back then, so Sonic on Master System deserves praise for being a well-made piece of software.
Speaking of things that were the norm back in the day, as always, this is a Sega game with a superb soundtrack, perhaps not as iconic or top notch as its Mega Drive counterpart mind you but still packed with more than a few catchy tunes. Let’s have a listen.
Of course, the iconic Green Hill Zone is fully replicated with the Master System sound chip and yes, of course, it’s an absolute banger. I think many modern video game melodies wouldn’t survive the trip backwards through time but Green Hill Zone is such a timeless bop that it very much does. Remix it, demake, I love it all the same.
Bridge Zone is an original song and level for 8-Bit Sonic The Hedgehog and while I find it to be the weakest zone in the game from a gameplay standpoint this tune is incredibly catchy. Every time I come back to SMS Sonic, this one gets stuck in my head.
The best song in Sonic The Hedgehog 8-Bit is this version of Scrap Brain Zone; I like this one so much that I actually prefer it to its 16-Bit equivalent. The Mega Drive Scrap Brain Zone sounds quite sinister but this one just screams final level. Brilliant.
The Tortoise And The Harehog
The biggest departure 8-Bit Sonic makes from the Mega Drive game is that the signature speed is de-emphasised in favour of more traditional platforming, this was almost certainly a decision necessitated by the technical constraints of the Master System.
It’s often overlooked today but you have to see Sega as an arcade-first developer rather than a console one; the goal of Sega’s consoles was to bring the arcade experience home at competitive prices and their game design philosophy reflected those arcade leanings, that’s why the Mega Drive has a faster processor than the SNES for quickly-scrolling screens, that’s why its sound chip is so bassy and distinct and that’s why, eventually, their hardware business didn’t survive the death of the arcade and the ascendence of the console as the primary home of video games. Sega games are loud, bold, easy to pick up and hard to put down because that’s the type of game that hoovers up your £1 coins.
What I’m getting at is, for better and for worse, 8-Bit Sonic is a very un-Sega game. Sonic’s usual speed isn’t possible on the hardware and neither is the classic 3-lane design of his stages or the addictive, arcadey loop of finding steep slopes and tall loops to build up your speed, instead, each level plays closer to something like Marble Zone on the Mega Drive with a few ramps here and there to roll down. That’s a statement I know will repulse some and enthral others.
On one hand, I think this version of Sonic The Hedgehog is a better platformer than its more famous counterpart: you don’t run into things you had no chance of avoiding, you don’t have those moments where you lose all control and can do nothing but watch Sonic spin through a loop and get carried by his inertia and neither do you have to tolerate the waiting at the likes of Marble Zone’s lava platform rides and moving traps in a game about going fast. But on the other hand… isn’t all that stuff what we’re playing Sonic for?
Let me be clear, I adore Sonic The Hedgehog but it was never the best platformer, there are plenty of arguably better games in the genre on the Mega Drive: Aladdin, Castle Of Illusion (which also has an entirely different version on SMS which I own and enjoy) and the likes of Earthworm Jim and Vectorman are just a few but the reason we love Sonic The Hedgehog: the reason Sega’s iconic mascot has persisted these 35 years, surviving infamous turds like Sonic ‘06 -a game so bad it caused me to sell my 360 as a kid in 2007 and stick with the previous generation until 2009- and the putrid Sonic Boom: Rise Of Lyric is that, love him or hate him, you’ll never out-hedge the ‘hog. No other platformer feels or plays like Sonic does. Compared to the Mega Drive Sonic, this version does feel much less revolutionary and more akin to a standard platformer on a console full of good platformers. It’s like if Nintendo made Sonic for the NES: better crafted and well-paced… but despite what Huey Lewis says, it is not hip to be square.
Let’s talk about the difficulty. Sonic The Hedgehog on Sega Master System is a strange case because I don’t know whether to tell you it’s much easier or much harder than on Mega Drive. There is a case for both, let me explain.
Sonic for the Mega Drive is certainly the more consistent and well-crafted challenge of the two versions. Green Hill Zone is a safe tutorial level where you learn how to pilot Sonic in an environment with minimal risk to your pool of lives; if you do happen to fall into spikes or lose a life, it’s easy enough to find an extra or to pick up 100 rings. From then on: through Marble, Spring Yard, Labyrinth, Star Light and Scrap Brain, the challenge (mostly) follows a gradual increase until the end of the game.
8-Bit Sonic is much different. Green Hill and Bridge Zone are extremely easy, then Jungle Zone, Labyrinth Zone and Scrap Brain Zone are what I’d describe as at an average level of difficulty: you could lose a few lives here and there but I doubt most experienced platformer players will find much to struggle with, then we have Sky Base Zone and the final boss. I’ve played through this game -collecting all the Chaos Emeralds too- twice this week for the review and despite reaching the final fight with Robotnik armed with an extra continue and a pool of 8-10 lives… I just cannot beat him; it was a similar story last time I ran through this game about a year ago.
This absolute beast on YouTube makes the fight look piss easy and the first phase is: you just hug the wall at the back of the arena, bide your time and attack Robotnik when the energy beam shuts off and returns to its starting position in front of his glass pod but then in phase 2 it chases you around the arena shutting on and off at random intervals. I’ve beaten the rest of this game 4-5 times only to get clobbered by this final boss at the last hurdle every time.
I try to keep a level of decorum in these reviews but fuck this 8-Bit bald bell end and his stupid smile. I can’t beat this bastard! I’ve beaten Castlevania, every Dark Souls game, most of Ninja Gaiden on the NES and Halo: Reach LASO but this here has defeated me.
So, what can I say about the difficulty? Sonic 8-bit is definitely easier but I can’t finish this one, Mega Drive Sonic is harder but I can beat that one. I don’t know what to think.
To finish on a less foul-mouthed note, I much prefer how the Chaos Emeralds are gathered in 8-Bit Sonic. Rather than those irritating Special Stages, here they are hidden away in each level. The first couple are quite obvious but Scrap Brain and Jungle Zone’s emeralds are very easy to miss and it actually feels rewarding to grab these things, rather than a roll of the dice and your luck dealing with the physics in a platformer from 1991. There are still Special Stages in this one but they’re for hoovering up rings and getting more continues.
Blue On Blue
We’ve covered the premise, presentation and gameplay and have now arrived at the million pound question: is Sonic The Hedgehog for Sega Master System better than on Mega Drive?
The internet loves to deal in absolutes but I am not a Sith and neither will I claim that one of these is outright better than the other. Their pros and cons balance each other out well.
Sonic on the Mega Drive is full of questionable level design choices and the Special Stages aren’t fun to play but the presentation and the seismic impact it had on the industry cannot be overstated, plus the difficulty is much more finely-tuned. The highs of 16-Bit Sonic are higher but the lows are crushing too… looking at you, Labyrinth Zone.
Sonic on the Master System doesn’t have that same rebellious attitude and experimental feel, its levels are quite mundane and the game is (until the last 10 minutes) much too easy but the level design is tighter, it cuts out the annoying Special Stages and the fact that controlling Sonic feels the same despite the hardware gap is undeniably impressive.
I still prefer Mega Drive Sonic The Hedgehog. I don’t think it’s objectively better but it is the version for me. I believe both of these games are on the Sonic Origins collection but make sure you try the Master System version of this game, not the cramped Game Gear one.
Long May He Spin
Now to get a little bit serious but I promise this does circle back round to Sonic.
Mortality has been on my mind a lot lately, since starting this Substack in January 2025 I’ve lost 2 pets to mysterious diseases and one uncle to a rare and aggressive form of cancer; another looks to be going that way too. My own parents aren’t getting any younger and the realisation now that I’m 26 that the people who raised me probably won’t be here when I’m 46 is beginning to set in. I was morphed into such a Sega fanboy as a kid by my mum’s love for the Mega Drive; I was always gifted these Mega Drive Collections and my older brother always told me stories of my mum having to beat Goro for him on the Mega Drive’s Mortal Kombat port in the 90’s. A few years back, before I dropped out of university I even used a chunk of my student money to get her a Mega Drive for Christmas where we played Sonic 1 and 2 together until the wee hours of the morning.
Sonic The Hedgehog on Mega Drive has been ripped apart by the internet in the past 20 years and Sega’s contributions to console history have been largely forgotten by younger Gen Z and Gen Alpha retro gamers -who got into the scene watching people like Scott The Woz and JonTron rather than AVGN- but to me? This is a game I’ve been playing since I was 4 years old and memories of CO-OP-ing Sonic with my mum for hours are ones I will keep forever. There is a certain cabal of video games I intend to introduce my children to early if I’m ever fortunate enough to have them and the original Sonic trilogy is certainly on that list.
35 Years on, Sonic The Hedgehog is the ozymandias to a dead console manufacturer and a subject of ridicule by those who have built their own digital empires on the industrial infrastructure he and Sega helped create. Sega exist as a mere rump state, now known better for publishing the ailing Total War franchise and the Yakuza games, which have veered far off-course into parody.
There were many better platformers on the Mega Drive. Few talk about them anymore. Sonic hasn’t lived forever because he has the best games or the most gripping narratives, Sonic lives on because these games are singular in their design, rebellious in their nature and absolutely unforgettable for those who have enjoyed them. Design conventions and measures of quality change with the times but individuality and genuine style is immortal.
Go and enjoy a chili dog.
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Great article, you sum up Sonic's appeal very well.
Sonic 1 on MD is such a cultural touchstone for me. I played it a few months after it came out and I just fell in love with all of it. I know it has its issues, but I love every last bit of it. Yes, even Labyrinth Zone.
Not to sound too much like a snarky old man, but with certain media, the phrase "you just had to be there" really applies. Sonic 1 is definitely one of those cases.
(Reclines back in old man rocking chair) Ah young Lawrence, you've triggered some memories here...
My gaming upgrade path ran from ZX Spectrum to Master System to Mega Drive. My ambition was always to want Sonic on the Mega Drive (specifically Sonic 2), but I went with the Master System first. This was because a lot of my school friends had one too, so we could play and share together.
While I would still lean towards the Mega Drive games as being the better ones in my opinion, I can't deny the charm the Master System games had. The map screen alone made it clearer there was an eventual goal to the game instead of level after level.
Great article as always. Plus, you mentioned some other classic Master System games here and there, perhaps we will see your thoughts on those one day? Because I agree that Castle of Illusion on Master System is better