View “Sonic the Hedgehog Oddities” slideshow

The iconic spiny mammal saved Sega’s console in its hour of need and spawned a massive franchise that spans dozens of releases for every Sega console (and plenty of non-Sega platforms since 1998). And whether we like it or not, Sonic started a trend of animal game characters with ‘tudes that continues to this day.

To celebrate the anniversary, I dove headfirst the annals of Sonic lore to pull out oddities for your entertainment.

1UP editor Jeremy Parish is celebrating a little early with a retrospective. He does a good job of looking back on Sega the Console Maker, explaining why the Dreamcast was an important product — it had great games, mostly — and what led to its demise. But what really struck me while reading was how much the game console business has changed and solidified over the last 10 years.

Ever since Microsoft launched the Xbox in November 2001, we’ve been playing consoles from the same three manufacturers, with virtually no outside competition. That was unheard of in the 90s, which saw a handful of console makers come and go. The 3DO, Atari Jaguar, TurboGrafx-16 and Neo Geo all took a stab at the home console market, but either failed miserably or didn’t produce any progeny.

Sega was a different case because, as Parish points out, it had been around. Even before the Genesis fiercely competed with the Super Nintendo, there was the Sega Master System, and before the Dreamcast came the Sega Saturn. Sega’s exit from the console market was significant because it made room for Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo to dominate.

I don’t see any of those three manufacturers bowing out any time soon. If the Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and the Wii all stick to their goals of a 10-year life cycle, we’ll be looking at 15 years with the same three brands. The only competitors I see on the horizon are cloud gaming services such as OnLive and Gaikai.

That’s not a bad thing as long as everyone’s innovating. It just underscores how console gaming is no longer a wild and unpredictable industry. By dropping the Dreamcast, Sega made the transformation possible.

This list is by no means exhaustive, nor are all of these consoles bad overall (see The Worst Video Game Systems of All Time for that list). And though some of these problems keep popping up in one form or another–like the bad call of feeding power to the console via the RF switch shared by RCA’s Studio II and Atari’s 5200–other errors in judgments were unique to one console. Thank heavens for that.

In chronological order…

RCA Studio II (1977)

Problem #1: Poor Controllers

The RCA Studio II shipped with no external controllers, just a pair of built-in ten-button keypads. These keypads were awkward and uncomfortable to use. It made games difficult to control and limited the potential of software for the system.

What Were They Thinking?

My best guess is general cluelessness as to what constituted a decent game controller on RCA’s part. To some extent it’s excusable, since home video games were in their infancy in 1977. And there’s no doubt that omitting detachable controllers reduced the system’s overall complexity and thus manufacturing costs overall — but it also greatly reduced the consumer’s desire to buy and play the system.

Problem #2: Power Through RF Switch

Similar to the Atari 5200–see below–the RCA Studio II received main system power through the video output cable. An AC adapter plugged into a special RF switch that provided power to the console, but unlike the 5200′s switch, the Studio II’s did not include any special functionality. Studio II owners with lost of damaged RF switches found themselves regretting their purchase.

What Were They Thinking?

RCA’s engineers probably felt that it was simpler to have one cable going in and out of the system. It was simpler — in the short term–until someone lost their switch box. Today, the special Studio II RF switch is extremely difficult to find (and for an already difficult-to-find system, that’s bad).

Mattel Intellivision (1979)

Problem #3: Ergonomically Hellish Controllers

Like most keyboards on early personal computers, the hand controllers and joysticks included with early video game systems were typically pretty bad. It took a long time before one innovator clearly came along (in this case, Nintendo with its NES pads) and provided a truly easy-to-use, accurate, sensitive, and comfortable solution.

Mattel’s Intellivision controller is no exception to the early-but-awkward rule. It includes a digital 16-direction disc that players pushed inward to control an onscreen character, similar to operation of +-shaped Nintendo control pads, but nowhere near as precise. If you were tempted to rotate the disc while depressing it for quicker maneuvers, you’d quickly be disappointed by the controller’s erratic performance.

The controller also included two buttons on each side of the unit (each set with the same function) that were hard to push and provided poor tactile feedback. Even worse, the controller was an odd shape that didn’t fit well in any human’s hands.

What Were They Thinking?

The designers at Mattel responsible for the Intellivision controller probably thought they were being clever and innovative. Sadly, they were wrong. Many players suffered through the controllers anyway, as the Intellivision hosted a large share of great games. Like proponents of other bad-but-classic technologies, those who defend the Intellivision’s knucklebusters primarily do so out of nostalgia (i.e. we walked uphill both ways on nails and we liked it).

Interestingly enough, the Intellivision wasn’t the only “-vision” game console to ship with bad controllers — the ColecoVision also came with a pair of its own stumpy, keypad-laden ergonomic nightmares. But that’s for another article.

Atari 5200 (1982)

Problem #4: Unreliable Analog Joystick

The Atari 5200 shipped with a pair of analog, non-centering joysticks whose rubbery buttons provided little tactile feedback and would wear out or break easily.

What Were They Thinking?

Atari engineers likely wanted to try something new with the Atari 5200′s analog controller, which unfortunately didn’t translate well to the arcade ganes of the day. The controller’s absolute worst application was Pac-Man–a game that demands precise, 4-way digital control–that ironically shipped as a pack-in game for the console during its later years.

Had Atari put forth any sort of effort to develop new, original games that specifically took advantage of the 5200′s analog stick, the system might have fared much better than it did.

Regarding the buttons, they were unreliable due to the thin plastic flex circuits beneath them, which were prone to tearing from repeated pressure — the kind commonly seen in any button application. Oops. It’s likely Atari used flex circuits due to space concerns (the unit was pretty cramped) and because they were less expensive than rigid PC boards.

On the bright side, the 5200 joysticks included the world’s first on-controller pause button.