Revisited: Pizza Hut Demo Disc 1 (PS1)

From 1998 into 1999, the PlayStation was on top of the world. The Nintendo 64 was a solid second fiddle, and the Sega Saturn was completely dead. Sony’s marketing output was very aggressive, and even in first place did not hold back, hosting cross-collaborations with any company willing to play. Enter Pizza Hut, a nationally renowned chain of restaurants looking to boost their sales with the adolescent/young adult demographic. With qualifying pizza purchases, customers would receive one of two demo discs for their PlayStations free of charge. The Pizza Hut Demo Discs, as they would be known, are legendary little time capsules of nostalgic joy. It was the oddest yet successful collaboration of two very different companies, released at the peak of PS1 mania, and a wonderful example of the turn-of-the-century optimism we all briefly shared.

Demo discs are truly a lost art form. They were a staple medium throughout the fifth and sixth gaming generations, but they truly hit their stride on the PS1. They were everywhere; pack-in bundles, gaming magazines, checkout counters, mail orders, and yes, pizza deliveries. This was the best way at the time to check out the latest and greatest for your console, as the Internet was not ready for streaming video and print media could only convey so much. Watching video clips right from the disc, or better yet playing a snippet of the game itself, was the best chance a game had to capture your attention. Demos came out for games already released or still in development, leading sometimes to key differences from the full versions that game aficionados pour over to this very day. Sometimes final games would differ due to direct demo feedback of prior builds!

Crafting a good demo is a delicate balancing act. You want to deliver just enough gameplay, just enough length, and just enough replay value, of course with the ultimate goal of convincing a purchase of the full game. Should a demo be too short, it may be overwhelming and lose any player interest before it has a chance to sink in. Too deep, and the demo may suffice as the game itself. It requires finesse to perfectly serve a slice of the game: some demos succeed in this where others fall short. Plus, it does help for the game to actually be good.

With the house to myself last Saturday night, and trying to avoid the daily reminders of the shameful state of world affairs, I decided to transport my basement to the winter of 1998/99. I ordered in some Pizza Hut and downloaded an ISO of Disc 1. The pizza was… fine, I mean it’s Pizza Hut. As a proud tri-state area resident I must establish that true pizza comes from a local pizzeria. Pizza Hut, Domino’s, etc. are pizza-adjacent food products that have their time and place, but do not confuse them for the genuine article. Okay, now that I have my snobbery out of the way…

Through my research, I found the Pizza Hut Demos are renowned today for showing the best of what a good demo disc can offer. So let’s see how much mileage my demo freebie would give me if I got it with my pizza. Would I blow through it in a half hour, or could it enthrall me as much as any real game in my collection? And would I discover a new game(s) to play for real? After finishing my dinner, with the pizza box still in view, I loaded up Disc 1 and connected a DualSense to my emulator. In my head it was 1999, but my 4K TV, RetroArch core and PS5 controller kept me firmly in 2026. Hey, you do what you can…

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater

Wow, this disc really comes out swinging! Of the five games on tap, this is the only one I’ve played before and I’m extremely familiar with it. This was typical of demo discs, inevitably you’d get a demo of a game you already had. So it was fun to see what the demo offered knowing what the rest of the game has. THPS’ demo offers a two-minute single session in the classic Warehouse stage, with two skaters to choose from. In this Single Session mode your only goal is to score as many points as you can. Your score is even kept on a leaderboard for future runs. This PS1 demo differs from the demo I had for my Dreamcast, which offered the same stage but in the Career mode, with its objectives in place and ready to be cleared. (With skill you could clear all five in a single run!) The PS1 demo also features the game’s menu system with most options greyed out, with the ‘NOT IN DEMO’ messages outlining what else the full version has in store.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater goes down in history as one of the greatest games, but also as one of the greatest demos of all time. It’s a perfect representation of the game as a whole with a shocking amount of replay value, acting as a self-contained score attack that could easily tide you over for the months until your birthday or Christmas when you’d finally get the game for yourself. This demo alone is worth the cost of the pizza.

Ape Escape

It’s easy to forget that the PlayStation originally came with a controller that did not feature rumble or analog sticks. The DualShock we remember today released midway through the PS1’s life, and was initially seen as a novelty controller. A gimmick, instead of a game-changer. Games today that use analog control (such as modern first-person shooters) were not common on the platform, and camera control was historically done with the shoulder buttons, not the right stick. So this quirky controller had to have a quirky game to justify its existence, and that game was Ape Escape.

My only experience with Ape Escape was knowing it was designed to showcase the DualShock controller, a game that could not be played otherwise. As such, the left stick controls your movement and the right stick aims your net/gadget. If that aim was mapped to the face buttons, you would not have that fluid level of 360 control. Some gadgets also use the right stick in different ways independent of your main control. It’s really interesting to see a bog-standard controller nowadays be treated as this unique input, by mentally transporting back to 1998 you really see the wonder they saw in it. At one point you control an RC car with the right stick while following it with the left stick. Again it’s a really simple sequence but it feels so fresh, all with a industry-standard controller. I’d love to play this game in full to see how much more innovation they squeezed out of a DualShock. Oh and the main objective of catching monkeys with a butterfly net is pretty fun too!

This demo is on the meatier side, with an explorable hub world, two full levels, and three tutorial areas. The levels can also be revisited after collecting additional gadgets, allowing for 100% level completion, and then time attacks for each level with a designated time to beat. That’s right, in a mere demo you have backtracking, item progression, and goal-based time trials! This really is a self-contained (very small) game in its own right, with infinite replay value. There’s a lot here to like and play with but you’re left wanting more, and that’s what pulls the purchase trigger.

Crash Team Racing

No kart racer has been able to de-throne Mario, but Crash Team Racing is among the closest. I never got around to playing it despite interest, so this was my first go around the track. And after rounding the first corner, oh yes, I can see why this game is so highly regarded. It feels great, looks great, runs great. Unfortunately, part of a kart racer’s appeal is its character lineup, and I’m unfamiliar with Crash’s universe. I’d imagine many others are also, and no matter how good the game is, this disconnect is what dooms the series into its cult status.

Compared to Ape Escape, CTR’s demo is notably light. No menus, no options, no choices, just a brief tip screen and you’re thrown into a single three-lap race on a single track. The race itself is fully-featured, with items, characters, and track features, so there’s not much more the game needs to offer. And it doesn’t. After finishing your race, the game hangs awkwardly until you quit back to the demo menu. At least show me the finishing times or something!

Yes I’ll play the full version based on the fun I had with the demo, despite its unfinished feel. I’d write this off as a ‘bad demo’ if not for one thing: multiplayer. It’s very rare for a demo to feature 2-player support, but it doesn’t end there… The CTR demo features a 4-player option!! This disc really is a relic of another time: not just the support of a new controller but the support of an optional multi-tap?! It was rare enough for a PS1 game to use it, but a demo disc no less, what an absolute treat for those that had one. So yes, as long as you don’t mind only one racetrack and a spartan interface, grab three friends and fire away!

Cool Boarders 4

Any game collection, even one as revered as this, is allowed to have a dud. And well, here it is. Somehow this demo is even more basic than CTR’s, dumping you immediately into a race on a single track with a single character. After your roughly two-minute ride down the mountain, you’re booted right back to the disc menu. The game is over and shut down before you have a chance to figure out what it is. Even Tony Hawk kept a scoreboard and stayed within its game for you to replay. Constantly rebooting from the disc menu to get back to the action gets tedious quick, and it subconsciously nudges you to play something else.

No offense to the game, and those who enjoy it, but I had a very hard time figuring it out. It seems like it should be so simple, a race down the mountain pulling tricks as you go, but the controls fought me the whole time. I tried to play the game like Tony Hawk, but it really doesn’t handle the same way. I kept bailing and getting caught on scenery, losing all momentum and finding it hard to maintain speed. Holding down X to prep a jump helped sometimes, but held too long and I wouldn’t actually jump? Also, this is a race, no? Am I meant to be tricking for points or just getting to the end in first place? We have two game systems at odds with each other, and I couldn’t figure out what the game was asking of me. Having zero instruction from the demo didn’t help. The end of the race also didn’t pull up any times or scores, so I have no idea whether I technically won or lost. I felt like a loser by default.

Unfortunately we have a case of a bad demo of a mediocre game. Oh well. There probably is some fun to be had here, with the determination of squeezing blood from a stone. If this was your only PlayStation disc, which was very possible for some gamers, you’d make it happen. Whoever decided to match this demo up on the same disc as THPS did the game particularly dirty, as the Hawk outclasses this game in every way. And I’m sorry, this is Cool Boarders 4? As in, this series did so well three times over to get to this one? Woof.

Final Fantasy VIII

I know what you’re thinking, since I was thinking the same thing: “How on earth do you come up with a demo of a massive, world-class RPG, and then casually pop it on a disc alongside other games on a promo disc from Pizza Hut?!” Well, they did. And oh man they did. Give yourself some time for this one, as they managed to put an experience on this disc I didn’t think an unassuming demo could. 

I genuinely was not ready for this one.

I’ve made many attempts to get into Final Fantasy. Older entries, newer ones, remasters, spinoffs, but nothing has stuck yet. So although I have working knowledge of it (as I do RPGs in general), please forgive my ignorance. Technically I’m exactly the type person this demo was targeting. Right off the bat we’re greeted with some gorgeous CGI cutscenes: the soft-focus, floaty, pre-rendered clips the PS1 was famous for. Quaint today, but a signature of gaming’s fifth generation. After a smooth transition to the in-game graphics (also… quaint in their own way), the demo begins. I believe this is an adaptation of a mid-game quest in the final game, with a host of differences to help ease the new player in.

The demo for FF8 smartly ignores lengthy exposition and in-universe canon, with the purpose of giving the player various tastes of what this large game has to offer. The mission takes your party off the coast, through a city, up a hill, and to the top of an antenna tower. The random battles along the way give your characters a smattering of physical and magic attacks to try out with no restrictions, along with special attacks and summons that pop up from time to time. You’re left on your own to figure out the ATB system, and it’s refreshing to be allowed to just play around in a video game (crazy notion, I know). Usable items are limited to just health restores and revivals, though only usable in-battle. There are no in-the-field status menus or item usage—pressing the start button only leads to a toggle for the controller rumble. This, while very streamlined, does make the demo notably harder as all recoveries need to be done in the heat of battle.

At the top of the tower lies your boss battle between two enemy soldiers, when out of nowhere, a monstrous beast sweeps them away and becomes your new foe. (Yes I am absolutely going to spoil a 27-year-old game demo.) Upon its defeat, you’re commanded to return to the coast in 15 minutes… 15 literal real-time minutes that start ticking down in the corner for the rest of the game. As if watching the timer persist through load screens wasn’t tense enough, the boss soldier in its dying throe activates a giant crab-like sentry robot to chase you. It cannot be killed and aggressively takes HP as fast as you can replenish it with your dwindling items. And the time is still ticking! You book it back through every area you’ve passed through, with the sentry relentlessly on your tail, either as a real-time enemy or a CG cutscene demolishing anything in its path. At long last you make it to the coast and a final cutscene takes over: machine gunners on your ship blast the robot to death while the music swells and the Squaresoft staff roll punctuates the scene. As you sail away, the demo is revealed to be a film reel, with a scratchy sepia ‘WINTER 1999’ and sketch markings before the strip flicks off-screen. Immediately you’re booted back to the disc menu with no fanfare.

What. An. Experience. In one hour, I started knowing nothing about anything. Surely I developed a feel for the battle system, which is surprisingly fluid and cinematic. Even though you roughly take turns attacking, there’s still a beat to who attacks when. You may be menuing for one of your characters when your other one decides to begin their magic attack. Every battle’s camera angle is different, which can make things a little disorienting but it’s forgiven when the system makes you feel like a director in charge of your actors. You don’t control them as much as you suggest what they do when they're ready. And if you think the magic and melee attacks are flashy, just wait until you literally feel the rumble of the showboats that are the summons. You need to put on your nostalgia glasses and ignore the crunchiness, but the grandiosity of these graphics (especially at the time) are something else. So much flourish.

I felt empowered enough to beat the boss with the experience I gained messing around with the lesser enemies, but then came the countdown sequence. I was caught by the sentry one more time than I think I was supposed to, and I fled that battle with no items left and literally one character left with 10HP. When I finally got to the shore I prayed it was over, my grip tight on the controller. As the final cutscene blew the bot to bits and the developer names flashed all around I knew it was over, and I couldn’t help but shout a triumphant ‘OH MAN, YES!!’ to my dark, empty 1999 basement. I'm not ashamed to say my heart was pounding out of my chest over a 27-year old demo.

The FF8 demo is an absolute triumph. What a perfect wade into the shallow end of an abyss of a game series. This friendly demo welcomed me in and left me craving more, no longer intimidated but intrigued to go deeper. A game of this audiovisual caliber was impossible on any console before it, second only to its peers, and firmly set the PlayStation in a league all its own. This demo opened me and many other gamers up to a new kind of game, and the gumption to give a JRPG this type of exposure was a major gambit that paid off handsomely.

So did Pizza Hut Demo Disc 1 live up to the hype? Oh, did it! It did exactly what it set out to do, and entertained me for a full Saturday evening. This would not be recycled with the pizza box, and would definitely stay in my library for an occasional break from my other games. It added a few games to my backlog, that's for sure: Ape Escape especially. It reminded me I’m overdue for another Tony Hawk 1 run, reinforced that I should really delve into Crash Team Racing, and I’m more hyped than ever to break into Final Fantasy VIII. As for Cool Boarders 4, well it's a game all right. Pizza Hut lovers and PS1 gamers in ’99 had a fresh list of titles to raid Blockbuster and beg their weary parents for, all thanks to Disc 1.

And when their craving for another Stuffed Crust came around, those lucky gamers found Disc 2 tucked in their box… so next week let’s order a pizza and do it all over again.

Mini-Gaming #011 - Alisia Dragoon (Genesis)

Video game release dates are unfortunately spotty in the 80s and early 90s. The markets were fragmented and the industry wasn’t taken seriously enough at the time for accurate bookkeeping. After all, video games are just sophisticated toys, right?

Well, with a vague release date of March 1992, today might well be the 34th anniversary of our next Mini-Gaming feature: Alisia Dragoon. I was originally going to make a joke about how the year is 199X and all of the good Genesis games at Blockbuster have been rented out. All that’s left is this oddball-looking game about a magical Amazon-looking woman… ok sure I guess I’ll take it out. But when I saw that release window I couldn’t help but notice the coincidence.

Alisia Dragoon is a hard game to classify. It’s a one-off Genesis exclusive that combines platforming, shooting, and light RPG elements with an original setting and story. You control Alisia herself through eight stages of action, shooting your way through enemies and defeating bosses of ancient, futuristic, magical, and alien origin. Alisia shoots auto-targeting lightning from her hands, governed by a power meter that runs down as she shoots. When not shooting, the meter replenishes, with stronger attacks reserved for the very top of the meter. This establishes a cadence of shooting and waiting to allow your attack to be strong enough to be effective.

But Alisia is not alone. By her side is one of four miniature dragons, or dragoons I suppose. Each one can be called upon at will and offer their own auto-attacks along with Alisia’s. One shoots straight fireballs, one shoots boomerangs, and one unleashes a screen-clearing bomb at regular intervals. The last is more of a sprite than a dragon and doesn’t shoot anything, but does damage any enemy it comes in physical contact with. This seemingly useless helper wound up being a surprise asset when it came to some bosses, and the strategy became less about shooting them and more of lining up Alisia to make the sprite strike the boss for a quick defeat.

Alisia Dragoon is a console game that thinks it's an arcade game. You have one single life for the entire game—the collectable 1-ups are not extra lives but continues. You are given a rather generous health bar and while enemy hits are weak, but they are very frequent. This is one of those games where you will just constantly take damage and you have to be okay with that. Most of the stages are quite short but incredibly dense, loaded with enemies, items, and secrets. You’ll want the manual handy as the glyphic items are hard to distinguish, nothing about them indicates it’s a level-up or a heath restore aside from the fact they look ‘magical.’ Many of the better items only appear if you stand on a particular point in the level, so keep a look out for conspicuous areas. The game presents itself frantically with semi-respawning enemies and your large lightning attacks, but blowing through it will do you no favors. You really need to dissect each stage and find as many upgrades as you can, as well as health restores to top you off as you constantly get hit by something you couldn’t avoid. 

It’s an odd balance: Alisia trudges along, getting hit constantly while you wait for your power meter to fill up, then your massive attack clears out everything only for a new enemy to swoop in and attack you. Holding your attack on a larger enemy will eventually kill them too, but then your power meter is decimated. Mind you the meter refills very quickly but they become the longest few seconds of your life. The game regularly doles out health potions as you progress, acknowledgment that this is just how the game is. It becomes an endurance match after a while, and eventually you don’t beat the game as much as you’ll just outlast it.

The game is very eager to end you and bump you back to the title screen, but not before giving you a results screen showing how far you made it and awarding you an arbitrary rating. Repetition is clearly the key to Alisia Dragoon, as you’ll have to keep replaying to memorize the stage layouts, enemy patterns and find the secret level-up items that will bolster you for the later levels. You’ll find hidden items to extend the health bar and raise the attack power of not just Alisia but your four dragoons as well. As you develop your playstyle and know what’s coming ahead, you’ll have to strategically choose who and what to level up when.

As I tried to play as genuinely as possible, it took many playthroughs to claw forward through the game, and the repetition did generally help. But nothing helps when a new enemy or boss gives you no chance to learn its pattern and kills you straight out; now you’re back to the title screen with nothing but your dumb in-game rating to show for it. Maybe you’ll make it back to that late-game boss after another arduous playthrough and you’ll last a little bit longer, dodge an old attack and lose to a new one, Game Over once again. And as the nature of Alisia Dragoon is to keep damaging you, you never feel like you’ll achieve a perfect run. It can be a little disheartening knowing you’ll eventually beat the game but never be particularly great at it. The playthroughs get repetitive after a while too, as you’re trying to re-collect all the secret level-ups over and over for a chance to get back to where you were last time. Combing all the secrets in each stage gets stale. That’s when the save states begin to tempt you, and luckily we have the access to them today to just finish the darn game.

For what it’s worth, the game has a lot of charm and a lot of heart. The music is wonderful and the sound effects are honestly fun to listen to. Each various item has its own twinkly, gamey flourish, and they sound as rewarding as they are. Even every stage intro has its own opening jingle. There are also a few cutscenes where the game will take over the controls, flashing ‘DEMO’ in the corner when you attempt to override. There is a rote story in place, and the game does a good job in its presentation to get you vaguely interested without overreaching.

So did I enjoy Alisia Dragoon? It’s really hard to say. It’s a unique experience; a combination of familiar game genres and systems that make a game you’ve never played before but could swear you have. It is compelling to play with the mechanics and see how far you can go with the working knowledge you gain, the secret items you can stumble upon. But again locking in to finish it can be a chore. This is not a game that you get quicker at as you replay it, and the enemy hits are intentionally relentless no matter how methodical you play. The visuals and especially sounds do help try to boost your morale, but overall it becomes clear why this is a one-off game that few remember or cherish.

Honestly though, good for Sega for digging Alisia Dragoon out of the vault and placing it in the Genesis Mini. Many other games could’ve taken its place but Alisia stands proudly in the lineup. This really showcases what a ‘designated rental’ game was like back in the day, an odd release that has a lot to offer, at the very least just something different to cleanse the palette. It may not have sold well or risen above cult status, but these retro experiences are still valuable and when it comes to exploring ‘new’ old games, the diversity is really the strength.

Mini-Gaming #010 - Granada (Genesis 2)

The Sega Genesis Mini 2 was quite a surprise when it was announced and released in 2022. The mini-console fad had run its course, and Sega already made a successful entry with its original Genesis Mini. It looked and ran great with a solid game lineup. It was surprising Sega released an in-house console at all, as hardware was no longer its focus for the last 20 years. Yet the Mini 2 made a subdued launch with an all-new lineup of Genesis (and Sega CD!) games, as well as games that were unreleased, out of region, and even completely new. It’s probably the most intriguing of the mainline minis.

As 40 go-to Genesis games were already out on the Mini 1, the Mini 2 pulled from deeper in the library, focusing on more second-string and uncommon releases. Despite the negative connotations, these are far from low-quality games. These are cult classics at best and quirky oddities at worst. Echoing my Sonic 1 story in the last post, many of these games had single production runs and/or modest sales. Once they sold, they sold, and stores quickly cleared them out to make room for the next wave. Especially for a later Genesis gamer, there were scores of games you’d either see at a friend’s house, on the rental shelves, or tucked in a magazine or catalog. And if you still didn’t see them, you’d never know they existed. Granada is a fine example of this.

Granada is one of the many earlier-wave Genesis releases that pulled from a Japanese computer called the Sharp X68000. This general-use PC never made its way to the US and was revered for its surprisingly strong lineup of game software. These games ported well to Sega’s console and were a welcome third-party fill-in. Many of them share a similar kind of vibe: high-tech, hardcore, and ‘crunchy’ for lack of a better term. A lot of them are space shmups, but Granada is a bit different, taking place on dystopian Earth as a free-roam top-down shooter.

As I played Granada it reminded me of a cross between Soul Blazer and Rally-X. Levels take place on vast areas as you hunt down marked enemies on a radar map. Marks are either enemy generators or major cannons. After destroying every mark, the boss mark activates with a battle in either a fixed arena or in the open field. You get a generous amount of time to clear each level, though a Time Over just kills your ship and respawns you immediately with a fresh clock. Granada is odd with its hit points: you’re given a large shield bar that ticks down with each hit. There are no health pickups. Losing a ship respawns you on the spot, and losing all ships Game Overs immediately. Back at the title screen you’re given a chance to continue at the stage you ended at, up to 3 times. Especially in a genre that’s usually punishing, it’s an oddly generous system that trivializes lives—it’s tantamount to having one life with 50+ hit points and no way to replenish them. Again, it’s nice but just a little odd.

There are 9 stages, each one completely different from the last. Some stages are wide open, while others are tight corridors. Every stage has a maze-like feel to it, but never so much you feel lost. You’re given infinite ammo for a weak rapid shot and a strong blast shot (16x stronger according to the manual) at the cost of a significant recoil. Each stage also features a unique option weapon (remember that term from Last Resort?) that will help out and is optimized for the stage they are in. The variety in stages and firepower make for a game that’s always throwing a new surprise your way, with little repetition outside of the main objective. The variety extends to the bosses, with some stalking you around the map, some acting like a traditional vertical shooter boss, or even one that requires bank shots to hit. Some of them can be a little cryptic though, as they could’ve been more obvious when a weak point (or any hit point) is struck. A good old-fashioned health bar wouldn’t have hurt, either.

Granada is one of those games that simultaneously has a deep (if nonsensical) story most likely caught up in its own translation, while also featuring barely any of it within the game itself. This is an unfortunate product of its era, where English translations/Western localizations were given very little care and attention, either overwriting old stories completely (with something worse) or translating them so phonetically they almost make no sense. Even after reading the game’s manual, screen text, and online webpages, I still have no idea where the name comes from or what exactly is going on. It seems they tried to make the story overly wordy to come off as sophisticated; all it did was make me ignore it even more. Luckily this game puts its gameplay before anything else and is all the better for it.

Granada is a solid, arcade-inspired game that thankfully stands out with its gameplay and approachability. I’m sure it certainly had its fans, especially with enthusiasts of the X68000 ports, and in later years probably made for a solid B-tier rental. It took me a few sessions to finally clear the game on Easy. At my peak I managed to reach stage 7 reliably on one credit, with 8 eventually following and savestating my way through 9. With such a large shield bar, the game expects you to take hits (and oh, you will) but the last stage is utterly ridiculous, especially with recoils pushing you into bottomless pits that shave off your shield in one go. The game’s high time limit encourages you to be strategic with your approaches, taking it slow and angling your shots to avoid return fire. But so many enemies take pot shots at you constantly, and I always found a way to get hit by them. After a while you get numb to them, until you remember there is no way at all to recover health!

This is a game I would have never given a chance, either on a rental shelf or in my ROM library. It’s just too out of my comfort zone, with not enough of a pedigree for me to bother trying. But having it in the Mini 2, staring me in the face forced me to give it a real go, and I’m really glad it did! Thank you, Mini-Gaming, for giving me a wholly new retro experience. Granada was a fresh diversion in this list, and now I see first-hand why so many gamers, then and now, swear by the X68000 ports the Genesis had to offer.

Mini-Gaming #009 - Sonic the Hedgehog (Genesis)

Sonic 1… what can I say that hasn’t already been said? The icon, the legend, and my childhood hero made his debut with this game 35 years ago. The original Sonic the Hedgehog was the secret weapon Sega banked its future on, and it threw the established gaming order on its head. Fun fact: did you know Sonic 1 predates the US launch of the Super Nintendo? Yep, Sonic is older here than the SNES by a few months, and although the SNES was created to keep up with the Sega Genesis and TurboGrafx-16, the shattering launch of Sonic forced Nintendo to pull out every stop they had for the next several years. Sonic gave Sega a fighting chance for the 90s, and set them up as best as he possibly could.

Today, Sonic has dozens of friends, adversaries, plot lines, and abilities, but in the beginning it was just him, Dr Robotnik (Eggman), and a Zone of Green Hills. Robotnik is kidnapping small animals and using them to power his robots, and it’s up to Sonic to free them and stop the doctor’s dastardly deeds. He’ll go through six zones of three acts each, collecting rings, defeating enemies, and knocking Robotnik out of the sky at the end of each zone. There’s lush forestry, volcanic ruins, flooded temples and shimmering cities to explore, as well as a mysterious realm containing gems of unspeakable power…

It’s a simple, run-to-the-right affair. But never before were gamers blessed with a platformer of such speed, physics, and quality. Platformers before Sonic were rigid and grid-based, but Sonic offered curvature and momentum, complete with a rolling jump that turned him almost into a pinball. Even the stages' undulating ground was not something seen in other games. He may not have had familiar moves like the spin dash or homing attack yet, but his spinning jump and forward rolls gave him utility that allowed players to tackle the game with fluidity, grace, and freedom. Competitors like Super Mario looked downright stodgy in comparison.

Sonic the Hedgehog is renowned for his Special Stages—courses that feature a completely different gameplay style and showcase major technical trickery. The prizes of these stages are the Chaos Emeralds, and no Sonic game is fully beaten without obtaining all of them. This tradition began immediately in his first game with bonus stages dubbed Secret Zones. Finishing an act with over 50 rings places a giant ring at the act’s endpoint to jump inside. Unlike later games which usually featured pseudo-3D, Sonic 1’s stages are top-down 2D mazes that continuously rotate. Sonic is permanently spinning and must jump off walls and obstacles toward the flickering emerald. There are six unique stages of increasing complexity for each color emerald, and although collecting every emerald would open up major perks in later games, in this first game they merely unlock a more festive ending cutscene.

Now how about some story time! I received my Genesis in 1994 with Sonic 2 as the pack-in title, and went on to play and own the further games in the series. Gifts and Blockbuster rentals would be of the hedgehog’s future adventures, but the original Sonic 1 was never to be found. This was back when e-commerce was nonexistent, and you were limited to whatever your local stores stocked. (Catalog and phone orders were also common, but not to my child self.) Sonic 1 was, at the time, out of print and out of reach. I only knew it existed through logic (surely if I have 2 there must be a 1), a one-off quarter on a random MegaPlay machine (Sega’s arcade-ified Genesis that played time-limited cartridges), and a classmate that let me borrow his cartridge for one glorious week. I all but gave up on ever owning the mythical game until one day, Toys R Us happened to stock the ‘Sega Classic’ re-issue of Sonic the Hedgehog! And there was only one copy left!! My mother, who knew how badly I yearned for Sonic 1, was almost as happy to see it as I was… and purchased it for me on the spot. My 6-year-old self was in shock the whole time we brought the last paper tag from its cubby to the counter for purchase. Getting a new game for no reason?! It was something she never did before and would never do again. Finally Sonic 1 joined my modest collection with its distinctive Sega Classic branding setting it apart, and this story of its arrival remains with me as a beloved childhood memory.

For my Mini-Gaming playthrough, it was only fitting for me to do a perfect run with all Chaos Emeralds and no deaths. Though I know the game like the back of my hand, it had still been years since I intentionally sat down and played it. This was my secondary goal in this blog challenge: not just playing new (old) games for the first time but play familiar games in a refreshed context. Sitting down, Genesis controller in hand, glow of the TV screen reflected in my retinas. It's the difference between scarfing McDonald's in the car and indulging in a chef's tasting menu: it's both food but it hits differently. Sonic 1 has aged like the fine wine it is, and the levels complement Sonic’s limited move set so well that his future abilities aren’t missed. 

Speaking of those levels, it’s interesting to realize only half of them focus on speed. The zones alternate between breezy and precise, and although today’s gamers criticize Sonic 1 for this, I disagree. If every stage was speedy, the game would get samey and boring quickly. You need a break from the pace in order to appreciate the freedom when it comes. The slower stages also demonstrate the precision control Sonic offers, remember that platformers at this time rarely allowed the level of finesse seen here. Also back in 1991, the ‘slow stages’ weren’t seen as slow, but standard. Platformers were not a fast-paced genre until now—Sonic’s high-octane adventure was truly a revolution. I mean think about it, even when you are running in Mario games, how fast are you really going?

Replaying the Secret Zones for the first time in years was also a treat. Even to this day they are disorienting, and there’s palpable tension trying to get Sonic where you want him to go. There’s a downward gravity at play, and each rotation puts Sonic in a new angle you must adjust for. The rotation is jerky but consistent (re-releases of the game would rotate smoothly), and I almost prefer the jerkiness. I found it helped with lining up and timing my jumps, even if half of them would fling me in the wrong direction. An odd bounce would set me right on course with a dreaded level exit, with my thumb crammed away on the D-Pad in a desperate nod to lean away from it, and another jump would set me on a speed-up panel, making the maze spin faster, now I hit a reverse panel and we’re going in the opposite direction… it’s a lot! Almost too much for today’s impatient and inflexible player, but for me a healthy dose of difficulty and excitement. Every emerald felt earned, even for a veteran player such as myself.

It almost felt silly to play Sonic 1 when I have hundreds of other games to explore, but this session felt like meeting up with an old friend. We’ve known each other since childhood, and things around us have changed a lot. But the spark is still there, as we laugh at old stories as if we’ve never heard them before. And we made plans to definitely hang out again, even if it won’t be for several years.