Earnest Question: Genesis/Mega Drive fans, what was it like to see the younger fanbase grow?

I became a fan in the Mega Drive days but was still a kid during Adventure. I enjoyed SatAm and AoStH because they had “Sonic” but after the OVA released in America and I got CD on the PC in the late 90s, it became obvious that the American versions were just not my thing. I loved the Adventure games, Heroes was okay, I legitimately thought Shadow was an April Fool’s prank, and I enjoyed Sonic 06 at first but I aged out of the series around then. I bought the games after that but didn’t beat any upon release but Generations and Lost World (though I skipped the cutscenes there).

I hadn’t really noticed anything about younger fans until I started watching more YouTube like 5 or 6 years ago and browsing the Sonic subreddit. They seemed to have ridiculous but sincere takes on the stories to me, but after learning more, I found I agreed with a lot of their points. I had sort of fell into the whole, “Sonic shouldn’t be serious,” mindset in the late ‘00s but after playing the Pontaff and Graff games, I find that those stories are just nothing to me. I don’t think the memories of kids growing up with them will be as strong as those of the ones who grew up with the earlier titles.

In conclusion, I see where they’re coming from and they’ve allowed me to better appreciate games that I ignored upon release or had automatically decided were only fun to me because I was a kid. So while I don’t think that Maekawa’s Sonic is the best written representation, I think the sincerity of the storytelling in that era is more palatable to me. People who say Sonic was only ever supposed to be slapstick crap usually grew up under the influence of the western media and are not only wrong, they are IMO the 30 year old equivalent of the 12 year olds who wanted Shadow to carry guns so they can feel more mature.

 

I was born inthe late 70's. In my school the ZX Spectrum and then the Atari ST were big, but the Master System was huge almost everyone had one in my school and I made many life friends on the back of the love for the MS. The Mega Drive wasn't quite as big at the start but it was getting bigger at the time of John Madden, but when Sonic game out it was nuts everyone wanted a Mega Drive and everyone loved Sonic and could actually play it nor matter if you were in the 80's or were 3 years old. Sonic 2 and Fifa on the Mega Drive were the 1st times I really saw people cueing outside shops for a game on launch day

Sonic sold the Mega Drive