• Join The Fed
• Advertise with The Fed

• About Us
• Contact

In This Issue

• Kicking Your Hamster in its Teeth
• X-treme Zoos Target Market
• Resurrecting the Chili Cheese Burrito
• Sonic in Bad Shape
• Journey into the Land of the Leopards
• Finding Boys Into Whom to Put Love
• Lions and Tigers and Bears, Go Buy!
• Murder Spree Continues
• Art With Dead Mice
• Puppy Love, the Wrong Way
• 19th Century Nursery Rhyme!
• Tender Moments with Bill and Reona
• Bibu the Baby Elephant
• Rob's Relationship Corner
• Marauding Interviewer: What's Your Spirit Animal?
• THEY WATCH
• Letters to the Feditor
• Thyroid Boy
• Interspecies Intellectual Masturbation
• Stickman Theatre

Matt Holden

My subject told me he'd meet me in some dive in the East Village, but after the third slur-through of its name, he snapped his cell phone off in a huff. That left it to me to dig through a dizzying array of back-alley trash-heaps to find my interview. I sauntered into a hazy watering hole at three in the morning, where I noticed my subject, sitting at the end of the bar. Clad only in faded red tennis shoes and torn gloves, he gave me a once-over with his bleary eyes before letting them drift back to the row of shot glasses splayed before him on the bar. If it hadn't been for the blue spikes, I wouldn't have recognized him - but few could deny that it was my childhood hero, Sonic the Hedgehog.

Over ten years in the cutthroat video game industry hadn't served Sonic well. His once-athletic form had suffered from one too many nights of take-out Chinese and bottles of cheap vodka, and his days of leaping great heights to hit bosses piloting increasingly outrageous death-dealing machines were long gone - he seemed to have difficulty balancing on his own chair, let alone the edge of a ravine.

I tentatively asked him how he'd been the past few years.

He coughed sarcastically and whipped out a pack of Lucky Strikes. "How does it look?" he said. "I'm doing children's television. Children's motherfucking television. In Japan."

Sonic the Hedgehog was created, in Japan, by the Sega corporation. His high-speed video game shot him into superstardom, and he traveled to the US to make sequels, license books, and live the good life. It was there, he said, that life started going downhill.

"It was the rings, I think, that did me in," he remarked, between swigs on a bottle of whiskey. "It felt like you could go on forever with those things. I mean, I hit spikes, I hit robots... if you took enough of them, it felt like you had whole extra lives to live." Sonic's "need for speed" and well-publicized addiction gave him a more dangerous edge over his main competitor, a middle-aged Italian plumber whose competing addiction to mushrooms and flowers made his work a more laid-back, hallucinogenic experience.

"You could say I was the punk rocker of that generation," he said. "There was the pounding music, the rings, me killing the robots, the fucking tripped-out bonus stages - I used to get so sick doing those. I'd throw up over the side of the level between runs. But we were young then, and the kids fucking adored me."

Sonic 2 was an even larger success than the original, and introduced Sonic to his onetime partner and protegé, Miles "Tails" Prower. But by then, his habits had started to dominate his increasingly hectic life. "We did endorsements for anything and everything. In between takes I'd be up in my trailer, speeding away. If I'd had any more rings I'd've been a goddamn telephone. Tails'd fly crates of ten over the Mexican border at night, and I'd jump on them the second they hit the ground, breaking them into pieces just for kicks."

Then came the scandals. "Super Nintendo couldn't stop us - they needed dirt. Something. Anything. And, lo and behold, the videos started popping up." The coup for Nintendo came in the last days of the 16-bit era. "We'd just been doing a Fruit Roll-Up commercial, and they kept the cameras running." He took a long, pensive drag on his cigarette, staring glassy-eyed over the bar. "I mean," he finally murmured, "the kid never flat-out told me how old he was. I know he had a pilot's license, so I figured that made him at least, what, fourteen?" To this day, Sonic denies the charges of inappropriate conduct that resulted from the steady stream of incriminating tapes and on-set accounts of his sordid relationship with his younger sidekick. "That little two-tailed bastard was just as into it as me. It was only when the money started running out that he started bitching and moaning."

By the time Sonic 3 rolled around, it was obvious that the team couldn't continue. "Tails was literally carrying me from level to level," said Sonic. "It was pathetic." In despair, Sega added a "Tails-only" option to Sonic 3 to increase replayability. When Sega attempted to enter into higher markets such as 32- and 64- bit, Sonic was late in appearing - if he ever appeared at all. Sega declared defeat several years ago and now licenses the Sonic Team, including the Hedgehog himself, to other game systems.

Do people still recognize him on the streets? "People shield their kids from me," he said. "All the big-name guys, they forget about me. I met that Gordon Freeman guy once, you know? Wouldn't say a fucking word to me."

I got up, trying to steady the drunken hedgehog. A helmeted head popped briefly in the door. "Hey, baby!" howled Sonic. "I'll prime your Metroid, know what I mean?" The door slammed shut. He looked up at me confidentially. "She ain't worth it. I remember when she was nothing and I was hot stuff. Now it's her and the Master Chief - I hear he's got force-feedback on that suit of his, know what I mean? What bullshit."