Why was Sonic designed to beat Mario?

By 1990 Sega had the hardware and the problem. The Mega Drive was not selling in Japan, the Genesis needed a face in America, and Sega's existing mascot, Alex Kidd, had failed to make any dent in Super Mario Bros. Nakayama's brief, as the creators retold it at GDC 2018, was blunt: Sega needed a new mascot for the next generation, a character as iconic as Mickey Mouse, who could compete with Mario and carry the company. He wanted a character Americans would like.

The company ran an internal contest, hundreds of designs deep. The shortlist included an armadillo, a porcupine, a dog, and an old man with a moustache in pyjamas who was recycled as the villain, Dr. Eggman. Naoto Ohshima's hedgehog won on a design argument made by gameplay designer Hirokazu Yasuhara: of all the candidates, a hedgehog is the one you can imagine dealing damage by curling into a ball and rolling. The animal was a mechanic before it was a mascot.

Ohshima then did something game designers did not usually do in 1990: he took his sketches to Central Park in New York and asked passers by to pick their favourite. The hedgehog won, the moustached Eggman came second, the dog third. Ohshima's conclusion, as he retold it at GDC 2018, was that the hedgehog design could transcend race, gender and different types of people, the universality the brief demanded. A hedgehog, he also reasoned, was an animal Americans knew but had rarely seen as a character, which made him ownable in a way a cat or mouse could never be.

Everything after the choice served the brief. Yuji Naka's engine made the character fast because speed was the one thing Mario was not; his rolling ball prototype set the shape of the levels; and Naka, while admiring Miyamoto's simplicity, deliberately made a more action focused game controlled with one button. Music was recruited the same way. Composer Masato Nakamura has said on record that the thing that really made him want the Sonic job was that everyone at Sega was so intent on the feeling of this is going to beat out Mario; he scored the game like a film because the ambition sounded like one.

Then Sega made sure the comparison happened in public. Genesis advertising staged Sonic against Mario directly, and Sega's mall tours ran a campaign asking Americans to vote between the two characters side by side, because the company believed the unconverted would pick Sonic on sight. At launch the Genesis was also bundled with the game in place of Altered Beast, putting Sonic in front of every new owner by default.

Sonic the Hedgehog outsold Mario's games in America for a stretch of 1991, sold over 15 million copies bundled with the Genesis, and, in the creators' own summary at GDC 2018, helped Sega surpass Nintendo in the American market for a time. The mandate was met almost to the letter: by its sequel, Sega could stage a coordinated worldwide launch day, Sonic 2sday, and sell out a 3.2 million cartridge first batch in two weeks. The console war that defined the 16 bit era is what a fulfilled design brief looks like.

Buyers of the mandate got the character Sega asked for, and also got the split personality the Library documents elsewhere: a hedgehog redesigned for American shelves by Sega of America against his creator's drawings. That argument belongs to the covers page below. The design itself, the part built to beat Mario, was never changed, because it never needed to be.