Patreon Letter - 14th April, 2018 (Patreon)

Recently on the Giant Beastcast, there was something of a fight about the merits of Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed, a 2012 mascot kart racer released for the 360/PS3/Wii U/PC and developed by Sumo Digital. The game is from back to front a Sega-branded arcade racing game, a genre defined almost entirely by Mario Kart, Nintendo's long-running series of games that are this but with Mario characters. Mario Kart is very well regarded as a worthwhile game for casual players and a fun-if-frustrating experience for racing game fans, in part because of its general slick presentation and an aggressive rubber-banding that will often keep races competitive beyond all reason.

The argument on the Giant Beastcast went, in summary, like this: Vinny enjoys Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed (which I'll call Sonic Transformed for the rest of this piece), especially playing it with his young son. He declares that it is as good if not better than Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, the most recent Mario Kart game on the Wii U/Switch. Everyone listens to his reasons and shoots down all of his points against Mario Kart or in favor of Sonic Transformed. Their argument boils down to two essential points I want to talk about today: a) Sonic Transformed is made by Sega, and b) Mario Kart is made by Nintendo. 

You might think this is reductive. Perhaps you too have strong opinions about how the dreaded blue shells are inherent to the joy of Mario Kart, and how they have a counter so it's fine. Perhaps you have an opinion on which of the Koopa kids is coolest, and whether you think Waluigi is cool or just Nintendo's attempt at a meme. Certainly you likely care about all of this more than you care about Shadow the Hedgehog, or Ulala and Pudding, or the aesthetics of Afterburner. But let's put all that aside in a bucket labeled 'taste' for today and let's talk about why a bunch of people got angry being told the Sonic racing game might be as good or better than the Mario racing game, a game most of them hadn't even played.

Games have always had a problem with inertial bias. Games are expensive, and they've always been expensive. As a child, many of us (us here is temporally limited to the pre-indie and smartphone days, I admit, and is exclusively about the console experience, a bias I'll admit because it's important to the point) had only one platform or were only exposed to one platform. We only had a handful of games and maybe acquired a new one only on birthdays and Christmas. Thus much of what we experience playing games in the mascot era dominated by Sega and Nintendo was defined by a passive bandwagoning. We could only get one platform, so we got the one most people talked about. We could only get a few games, so we'd get the biggest or most popular ones, and rent the rest. 

This was fed into by those who wrote about games also. Nintendo Power was ubiquitous for console players, because it catered directly and exclusively to the largest single market. You wouldn't have to pour over PC games you didn't even know how to run, you didn't have to listen to people badmouth the thing you invested all your birthday money in, it was a friendly space that affirmed your affiliation and told you about all the cool things that existed for you and you alone. Everyone else could go pound sand. 

I'm sure something like this probably existed for Sega in the era, but it might not surprise you to know I've never heard of it. Sega's popularity in the United States, when they were one of the platform makers, seemed to exist entirely in response to Nintendo. The games were meant to be cooler, weirder, edgier, and all the other ways a game could be extra. The people who were drawn to Sonic and the Genesis and the rest after often did so because of this counter-culture aspect wrapped around Sega. Sonic having attitude turned into the Dreamcast's eccentric, iconic lineup of colorful weirdos and experimental genre-making. 

But Sega didn't remain a platform holder, and in moving to just a developer they lost much of that cultural cache they had as fans dispersed to other platforms. Sure, Sega still made games and people still played them, but put into a wider ecosystem where 3D games were finally settling into the normalized trends we see today, Sega and Nintendo continue to feel like they exist in opposition to all trends making games that are, depending on your view, hopelessly burdened by nostalgia or refreshingly old-school and steadfast. 

This reality did and does Sega no favors, because Nintendo is still doing the same thing but with a friendly platform to boot. It is a long-held maxim that Nintendo designs consoles for Nintendo games, so no wonder Nintendo-developed games would thrive when they have hardware devoted to making them the best they can be. By not folding, by remaining a popular developer and platform holder, Nintendo can simply outspend and out-R&D almost anybody in games to this day. Thus Nintendo has come, culturally, to represent a de facto stamp of quality even as they quietly devalued their actual seal of quality in the face of modern games culture.

Sega has no such resources. Sega games often feel rushed and threadbare in the last two generations, as the company struggles with an identity crisis and an audience seemingly at war with itself over the expectations for the company. Sonic is so many things to so many people, but very few of them cast the mascot in the role of signpost of importance that Mario represents even as he's stapled to half of Nintendo's output. Nintendo games get imbued with the weight of decades of Nintendo's status as one of, if not the, leaders of game development. Sonic games get treated as jokes and curiosities, kids stuff or furry bait depending on how generous you feel today.

The quality of the end product doesn't really matter. I could have written as many words about the actual products Sonic Transformed and Mario Kart today as I did about this, and all of it would amount to a bunch of nitpicking about 5% of the game's design. I've played a lot of both, and they are essentially identical games when it comes to what they are and how they play. I happen to prefer Sonic Transformed, having recently given it a shot after this inciting incident, but that's not really my point. My point is that it's impossible to look at games like Sonic Transformed fairly unless you do a lot of work to unpack why people laugh at Sonic and assume Mario is good even when Nintendo labors under the same stagnation and regression that Sonic does.

Games criticism, of both the formal variety and just people talking about games with their friends, all operates under a lot of assumptions based around the calcification of what matters and what doesn't established during prior generations. Final Fantasy matters because once upon a time Square made platform-selling pinnacles of graphics and story for one genre in one era. It doesn't matter that they haven't put out a game that's really hit in over a decade. Inertia and cultural capital carry the day. Most of it goes unexamined, or becomes friction points for endless forum debate as generations come into games without these known facts and then get angrily shouted down by gatekeepers and the old ass men who still write about games in the scene. 

And so regardless of the actual game being discussed Mario will always be beloved, and Sonic will always bring out the haters, because that is the history and culture we have built for ourselves, and the world we have to seek to look past and tear down. One example of many. One example of hundreds. 

Until next time,

Em