Google picks the one fight it will never win—with Sonic fans

GamesActionSonic the HedgehogGoogle picks the one fight it will never win—with Sonic fansWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Sega)

The all-conquering tech giant that is Alphabet, nee Google, has finally overreached itself. The Google Play X account, essentially Google’s public-facing games side, decided to do its own version of a popular meme, a thread that began withthese fateful words: “Sonic, but as you scroll he gets older and older.”

I’ve been doing this job a long time, and one of my learnings is that you don’t fuck about with the Sonic fans. You don’t look too closely at the fanfiction, youneverimage search for Amy, and you certainly don’t mention that most of the post 16-bit games are rubbish. More than anything, you just don’t get the details wrong, and Google got everything wrong that it could have

Google Play got off to the most spectacular start possible, posting an image with the caption:

“1991 Sonic. The cover? Rotund. Husky. Still fast as lightning. The actual game? 8-bit GLORY.” Sonic the Hedgehog did see a release on the 8-bit Master System, but the game that made it a smash hit was the 16-bit Genesis / Mega Drive version. Google’s crimes didn’t end there though: the image features Tails.

Thus comes the first of many community notes, the X feature that allows community sourced corrections to popular tweets, which pointed out the above before going in with both red sneakers. “Tails (seen in picture) was not created until 1992 for Sonic the Hedgehog 2,“reads the note, “meaning this is not a 1991 Sonic, but rather a later port of the original game.”

Sit down and shut up, Google Play! Reader, it did not. In fact things got even worse.

1993 Sonic. Ok short king 👏 pic.twitter.com/3faTqCAPm8April 27, 2024

The whole hog

The above tweet claims this image of Sonic is from 1993, and my old ass can assure you that no videogames looked like this in 1993. The imperious community note dismisses Google Play’s nonsense, and even theorises about why it made such a mistake:

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“This is Sonic as he appears in Sonic Boom,” reads the note, “which released in 2014, not 1993. It is possible that Google Play have confused it for the game Sonic CD, which did release in 1993 and contains a song called Sonic Boom.”

“2003 Sonic,” is up next, according to Google, which then posts an image taken from promotional material from Sonic Jump (2005). The community note again lists all the games that did release in that year, a pattern followed on Google Play’ssubsequent tweetsabout “2006 Sonic” (“This image is from the 2017 mobile game Sonic Forces Mobile,” reads the community note).

“2020 Sonic,“says Google, with an image apparently from the 2020 film. Finally, it got one right! Not so, say the eagle-eyed hog nerds: “this frame came from the second Sonic the Hedgehog film which came out on 2022 not 2020” the community note sputters, incredulous at this continued car crash. Finally Google decides to tap out with its worst effort yet:

“2022 Sonic,“says Google. “Just like us, he’s healed from 2020 but isn’t quite the same.”

All in all, this is such terrible posting from Google Play that you half-think it must be deliberate: the only thing that dissuades me otherwise is the Sonic fans coming up with plausible theories for certain of the mistakes. There’s also some theorising that this may be down to AI generating the tweets, though these days it’s hard to tell whether something is bad because of AI involvement or just bad.

But whatever the reason, Google could not have got it more wrong than this. The real treat of course is in the replies, which are just the open-mouthed astonishment of an entire fandom at how they massacred my boy. Indeed, the final word on this whole farrago comes from the meme-happy official Sonic account itself,which simply replied to Google with: “what are you doing.”

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