Playing Sonic CD Felt Spiteful

Both the ZX Spectrum and Mega Drive sold over 3 million units each in the UK.

Gaming was big business in the UK long before SONY came along.

 

Hal-PC was not a gaming club, it was a general PC users club. I did not see Sonic CD on people's computers because of the gaming SIG, I saw them because Hal-PC was also one of Texas' most popular dial-up ISPs back in the mid-to-late 90's and I worked volunteer tech support there. I was seeing sonic CD on people's PCs that they were using for, like, excel or quicken, or netscape. My story is very applicable, because it's *not* a cross-section of pc gamers. Rather, I saw Sonic CD on basically everybody's computer that came in, gaming or not. That's my point, I have a view on what PC usage was like in the late 90's that *isn't* limited to me, my gaming friends, or my family. More than most people in this topic, I had an actual job that put my eyeballs on lots of random people's computers from this time period, and I'm saying Sonic CD was very common. It was like Sim City 2000, one of those games that basically everybody had installed if they had a PC in the first place.

Yes, by virtue of my story taking place at a PC users club, then I'm naturally self-selecting for the most hardcore PC users around. And I know this a largely console-centric board, so PC gaming is largely a blind spot for many people here, but PC gaming wasn't this unknown or small niche thing in the 90's. It really wasn't, stuff like Doom was installed on tens of millions of machines. That my sample comes from actual PC users does nothing to disqualify it, because that was a large market, definitely comparable in size to any console around. As someone noted, the thing being responded to was that Sonic CD was largely unplayed. That simply isn't true, it was a staple of PC gaming for a very long time, pushed because it ran on super low spec machines and sold at ultra cheap prices (and often free) for a very, very long time. As in, longer than a single console's lifespan. To say this market doesn't count or doesn't exist simply is not true, lest we pretend that PC gaming outright did not exist in those days or had million+ sellers. I'm talking about Sonic CD being frequently sold by the time the Dreamcast was out -- several years before the Sonic Gems collection which somehow had a large enough reach that supposedly enough people had played it that the opinion could be "corrected" according to narrative.

 

The PC version of Sonic CD was ubiquitous at retail stores, I remember that much. It was also the first Sonic game I ever owned (not counting only playing 1 and 2 at the neighbor kid’s house, and I didn’t have a Genesis at the time).

 

You don't understand. You're not just self selecting for the most hardcore PC users. You're self selecting for the most hardcore PC users in Texas, United States, during this time period. Which may well be a valid and applicable experience in your city and your state. Maybe even your country. Who knows. But "if they had a PC" is carrying an insane amount of weight there if we're talking about the world in 1999. Much, so much more than you seem to realize.

How about consoles? Well, consoles had a much more shared experience than PCs. Not that many people had even Sonic 2 on the Mega Drive, all things considered, but certainly there's a bigger multiplier there of people who played it once at a rental store or someone else's house than Sonic CD. That's how the market shaped itself even if less households had Mega Drives than PCs.

That, and the truth is, it's hard to imagine someone playing many Sonic games before joining the community, because chances are such a person would join the community by virtue of liking Sonic. So people get to know more Sonic games when they actually come to places like this and then get the other games-- and it turns out, as explained, everyone who didn't go to the special interest circle in Texas, US in the mid to late '90s had a much harder time playing Sonic CD than the other MD games (let alone, again, games we often don't consider like Flash based ones).

You claiming Sonic CD was in every PC during a certain period in a single country hardly disproves anything, much less offers an explanation of why, then, such a narrative would take place.

 

Sonic 2 was massive, huge lets face it but you leave Nintendo and not many consoles boast massive games sales close or equal to their userbase. It's like saying not many SONY P1 owners bought GT or PS2 owners bought GTA3, when you compare sales of the games to that of hardware sales same goes for Halo or Halo 2 on the OG Xbox

Also, I don't get your point of community. I would imagine most fans of the old 2D Sonic games played those Sonic games before they got on the Internet in a lot of cases, and most certainly before they joined here. Plenty of people did get to play Sonic CD, Cooljerk makes valid points. I would just say that those who did get to play Sonic CD on the PC in 1999/2000 probably didn't give a toss about it and were just playing it on their new PC because it came free or was cheap. Many console gamers were falling out of love with 2D games, never mind PC gamers.

I think that was part of the issue for Sonic CD too, when the masses finally got to play the game. Sonic CD was years old and so many people have moved on even Sonic fans.

 

I'm not comparing Sonic 2 sales to Mega Drive's userbase but to general population, or even PC userbase if you'd like. The point here is that Sonic 2 may have been huge, but that phenomenon is localized in time, place, demographics and class. But typically, in the '90s, I'm fairly sure a home console game would spread wider than a PC game (that wasn't in Windows Entertainment Pack, an MMO or Counter Strike I suppose) would because of the dynamics of its consumption for the many populations at large. Or in other words, it'd be easier to play Sonic 2 while not owning it than Sonic CD.

My point about community is that, well, this is a narrative within the community. And for good reason. For people who like Sonic enough to come to a dedicated discussion board and play Sonic games other than the ones that introduced them to Sonic, having played Sonic CD in their PC at home during the mid to late 90s in the United States isn't actually a common condition. "Plenty of people played Sonic CD!" okay sure. A number of people who go to Sonic message boards, orders of magnitude larger, wasn't there at that time meeting the conditions that made it so easily accessible, let alone desirable like both of us said, to people like Cooljerk. It's that simple.

 

To be specific instead of just sounding dismissive, this amazing piece of data from the International Telecommunication Union World Telecommunication Development Report and the World Bank tells us the world had almost 7 personal computers per 100 people in 1999, bringing us to roughly 420 millions PCs; the US, however, had a whopping 50 PCs per 100 inhabitants -- a figure countries like China and India never, ever reached. This means one in three personal computers in existence were in the United States around that time, unless I'm grossly mistaken in my calculations.

But there's more: this 2002 paper details how PC ownership inequality evolved in the UK and the US from 1984 to 1998, and the results suggest there was a growing "income, education, age, family type, and even racial categories" divide in PC ownership in both countries, with no signs of stopping. Now, does console gaming fare any better in terms of availability worldwide? Most likely not-- although I can imagine home console ownership being less concentrated in the US at that time than PC ownership. But it does mean there is a very good reason why people who weren't mid-to-high income, higher-educated people of white or not-white-or-black-or-hispanic descent specifically in the US are less likely to bring up their PC gaming habits from 1995 to 1999.

And, of course, this doesn't touch how people not having PCs in other parts of the world didn't mean people didn't play on PCs -- South Korea had almost 0.25 PCs per capita in 1999, but also had over 15000 PC방, which shaped their gaming culture a lot and didn't include ports of 2D single player games, certainly not Sonic CD. So "almost every PC I came across had Sonic CD installed in it so it was always one of the most accessible Sonic games" is a statement with a strong survivorship and confirmation bias if we're talking about the whole community.

 

I had a copy of Sonic CD PC from somewhere but couldn't play it on my computer, which I believe had either Windows 98 or XP. I'm sure I'm not the only one who had an unusable disc in the mid-2000s.

 

God bless you.

 

Oh, I get you but I also would say it can also depend on the game and by the late 90's PC gaming was getting very popular, and I think this was being helped with people wanting the internet and games like Duke Nukem 3D, Quake and Half-Life. I could see myself in my rural little village the growth of the PC in the late 90's, just by going to friends and families' house and how you started to see more and more living rooms with PC's in them and how shops like Game in Cardiff began to to have their upstairs room dedicated to just PC gaming.


I would say that most people who like 2D Sonic games got into Sonic by playing those games on the Master System or Mega Drive in the 90's not decades later I knew far more people who have played Sonic CD at the time compared to Mega Drive games like Toe Jam & Earl, Chakan ,it was more that Sonic CD didn't sell the Mega-CD to the masses and also its sales were low compared to Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 sales

 

You know, Sonic CD is my favorite of the OGs and was the first Sonic game I 100%'d. But Sonic CD sometimes feels like the most conservative platformer of them.

 

SCD is more about exploration than any of the other 2D sonic games. The path you take is purposely nonlinear and there is a reason time attack is separate with no need for (but also no restriction against) time travel. I'm a fan. Some it isn't their thing.

For the rest: Computers were expensive in the 90s. That isn't news. But here is the thing: It was a small game released on CD in the early 90s. If you couldn't buy it and you had a computer with an internet connection, you could still obtain it‍ ☠️ And keep in mind, during the 90s ISPs were in a mad competition to get new users, and internet free trial CDs were so common and were actually regularly delivered to people's physical mailboxes to the point people started using them as coasters they were so worthless

 

What I said mostly applies to late 90s/early 2000s in the US as well for similar even if internet was free dialup time costs money reasons too, and I should have specified that. I don't think many were downloading contemporary games in 1994/5 but I was never a Usenet user and I heard it was much bigger in that scene. But you are right my view on this is limited to how things were handled stateside. I'm told that some places in Europe are still worse than others in that regard even today. Then again there are rural regions in the US that even today don't have those services either

 

If nothing else, I think it's safe to say that the PC version of Sonic CD is how it got most of its exposure in North America spanning into the early 00s, and not so much in the rest of the world during that time frame.

 

The UK had Freeserve in the late 90s which was really big at the time and gave us unlimited use of the web. I still use my old freeserve address for my Yahoo log in LOL

 

I was right at the start, since I was sick and tired of my mum limiting my internet use for an hour a day (from 8PM to 9PM) because of the high cost of the internet use. In 1999 it was very big and so many people were jumping on board. Not just from my close family or friends, but you saw the people talking up freeserve over the web. It's one of the reasons why I went ape over the morons at SEGA Europe for not allowing Pal users to enteir their own ISP details right at the launch of the DC

You paid the monthly sub so you didn't get hit with the phone call bill with the Freeserve anytime package, which made the internet phone calls free and best all it was 24hrs a day.

Freeserve was very big at the end of the 90's and even in the UK more and more people were getting PC with the internet being a massive draw. I would simply say that come 1999/2000 more people saw all 2D Sonic games as old hat (more so after Mario 64), and it was all about 3D for platform games no one gave a toss over a 2D Sonic game not on consoles or if it was given away for a PC in the late 90's

Sonic CD impact was all about 1993 to 1996 IMO

 

I think it became much more common with the early 2000s re release as well. Sonic R, S&K collection, and Sonic CD all got bargain bin releases on PC. Especially with Sonic R that is when people started talking about the game like they'd played it rather than some mythical "if only I had a Saturn" thing. If we are talking about economic bar of entry that is when it was by far at it's lowest for all of these games, at least until some of the more recent mobile re releases. You could just go to a store and pick it out of the shovelware section