Decoding the truth behind the Sonic Franchise

 Who is the true protagonist of Sonic?

Sonic Frontiers is out, some people think it's okay, but I'm unhappy. Why am I unhappy? Is it because I think the game is bad? No. Is it because I dislike the direction Frontiers is taking the franchise now that's it has been all but confirmed that Frontiers is quite literally a new frontier for the franchise? No. It's because there is a moment, in Frontiers, where Sonic Team thought it sensible to provide a single-screen call back to Tails watching a missile launch in Station Square from Sonic Adventure. Excuse me, but what? I know, that according to the very hands-off control that Sonic Team claims over this franchise, technically all Sonic games have been canon since the first except for 06 and Boom. (And Forces did retroactively make the 2d era games and Mania into an alternate universe instead of just a 'prequel' setting like it used to be.) But to outright just refer to Sonic Adventure directly in the wake of Forces, is like kicking fans in the face and telling them to deal with it, and let me explain why.

The world around Sonic is always up for debate as we're constantly struggling to understand where we even are. It's decently widely excepted that Sonic is set in the land of Mobius, but this ain't the same Mobius presented in the long running Archie comics series, nor the Sonic X cartoon. In all of those media snippets, Mobius is a largely undeveloped super continent with a few connecting island nations populated solely and exclusively by 'Mobians'; which are anthropomorphic animal people that live as humans might in cities with jobs and all that good stuff. (Eggman is the unexplainable exception that most media chooses to ignore.) Under examination, it's not the most creative or inspired Anthro universe ever created, as the creatives rarely take advantage of their character's animal traits to define who or what they are; but it's functional, it works. But the games spit all over this.

Why do I say that? Well how about because for some insane reason, the early 3D Sonic games all depicted the land of 'Mobius' (It's not always identified as Mobius in every game, but now that Frontiers has directly referenced Adventure we're just going to have to assume all 3D games occur on the same planet.) as featuring cities with humans. And I'm not talking about humans and anthros, oh no! In Sonic Adventure 1, 2 and Unleashed, Sonic and his friends are the only humanoid animal people in the entire world. For some unexplainable reason. Yet if we fast forward to Forces we can see an entire populace of furry animal people being menaced by Robotnik and Edgy Boi's pathetically mundane army. So what in the actual hell is going on here, what is the make-up of Mobius, and why can't Sonic Team just split the canons so these glaring inconsistences don't have to be addressed?

The most sensible, but quietly troubling answer, would be that Mobius is indeed a land walked by swathes of Humans and Mobians; only that these distinct races of people remain staunchly segregated to their separate corners of the world with such staunchness that intermingling between the races is an aberration. Sonic and his friends' various expeditions onto human lands must be seen as a great imposition upon the fragile balance of peace between the nations, and Sonic's struggle to prevent Eggman's grasp for power could very well be interpreted as a political mission to prevent a human elitist from conducting an orchestrated strike on either the humans or Mobians and kickstarting some global conflict between the two races. Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 are pretty much Sonic's Operation Snake Eater, and Eggman is Colonel Volgin. But that is a rather dour interpretation of the Sonic universe, so let me offer my alternative.

I propose that not only does Sonic Adventure's human filled city and Sonic Forces' Mobian occupied city take place within the same timeline; but they could very well be the same city, filled with the same citizens, at different points in time. (It's hard to determine exactly where Sonic Forces' city is set, considering that area is only ever referred to as 'The City' in game.) I propose that the various Mobians are not, in fact, anthropomorphic animals inexplicably evolved to resemble humanity, but rather general human citizens of the world that have inducted themselves into a global furry movement and locked themselves inside a permanent fursuit linked to their 'fursona'. Perhaps they've even gone so far as to brainwash themselves into believing they are the animals who's form they've adopted. Somehow this trend has overtaken every human being within the land of Mobius. Every human, except for Dr Ivo Robotnik.

Robotnik is an intellectual, you see. A robotic scientist, to boot! He believes in the very rigid conventions of man and thus saw no allure in the promise of 'spiritual awakening' or whatever the growing furry world dogma promised it's converts. He's just a lonely, and grumpy old man probably equally confused and annoyed by the brash personality of Sonic, the young upstart who delights in tormenting the aging Doctor and defying that man's rigid concept of the world and who exists within it. Sonic was likely the first furry of Mobius, you see. The first to don the fursuit and fully embrace the representative fursona, and stoke Robotnik's bitterness, swirling with his 'savior-complex' and narcissism to the point where he thinks he has to 'fix' everything, even 'fix' Sonic from his 'delusions'.  Afterall, Eggman is always trying to use his robotic expertise to invent vastly ambitious robotic machines, powered by woodland critters, to achieve all sorts of grand end schemes we never get to see play out because Sonic delights in destroying them. 

But Eggman is mad. At least, the Eggman we see by the late Sonic games is. This is a man who creates apparently metal machines that are inexplicably weak to Hedgehog quills, who insists on printing his face on every invention he's ever made, who once split the entire world down the middle... for some reason. These aren't the actions of a sensible man! I argue these are the actions of a desperate man, who has grown more and more scared as the world has changed around him. Think, by Sonic Adventure Eggman had to come to terms with the fact that there was an entire posse of furry lovers following the man around as his 'friends'. Then, before you know it, the otherwise fair and sensible citizens of Mobius start picking up on the trend, and now they're all wearing fursuits and pretending they're human-cats and badgers and whatever! By the time of Forces, Eggman might very well be the last human not inducted into the Fursona world religion that has captured the soul of the planet.

So Robotnik prints his face on his giant machines, hoping that visage of humanity stirs some latent recognition in the brainwashed, he roboticises the populace hoping to confer some of their lost humanity back into them, he surrounds himself with humanoid robot confidant, whom he rages at and despises for their lack of humanity, but retain by his personal cadre for their comfortingly nostalgic shape. And once he even tried to team up with anthro aliens, recognising that if humanity can't be saved of it's own accord only an extra-terrestrial force could knock a wake-up call into their number. But nothing ever worked. Every alliance he ever made turned on him. And maybe a few times the stress of being so alone in the world made him flip and blow the world in two. A little. But what would you do, as the last person living in a world that has changed so fundamentally that you don't recognise anyone, and can't draw anything from it. Isolated and alone, Eggman still chooses to try and reshape the world to the way it once was, even if to this day he can't quite remember if Sonic was indeed the original patient-zero Furry, or simply a figment of his own tortured psyche emblematic of his tendency to create his own constant downfalls.

Calling this franchise the 'Sonic Franchise' is a misnomer. These games are a soliloquous dirge mourning the purgatory of a man adrift in a sea of isolation, atop his raft of stubborn spite. A man who, as these games roll on, has come to, or will come to, sacrifice all that he can. His calm. Kindness, Kinship, Love. A Doctor who has given up all hope of inner peace. Who made his mind a sunless space. A scientist who shares his dreams with ghosts. A human who wakes up everyday to an equation he wrote thirty-one years ago to which there is only one conclusion; he is damned for what he does. His anger, his ego, his unwillingness to yield, his eagerness to fight, has set him on a path from which there's no escape. He yearns to be a saviour against injustice without contemplating the cost and by the time he looks down, there's no longer any ground beneath his feet. That is his sacrifice. He's condemned to use the tools of his enemies to defeat them. He burns his decency for someone else's future. He burns his life to make a sunrise that he knows he'll never see. And the ego that started his fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude. And that's what Eggman sacrifices. Everything.

Theory begging

 Please sir, can you theorise some more?

There is an undeniable allure about having your game be subverted into theory fodder by a growing community of speculatives. (That's 'speculative thinkers' mind you, not 'speculative investor', we've enough NFT garbage in our industry already thanks very much!) Once people start making theories, that's the tug of the line you're looking for to know your bait is good and hooked, now you just need to reel it in as the hoards of hungry pseudo-intellectuals grope at your feed like guppy fish. And isn't that what an aspiring developer wants most in life? Hoards of ravenous fans who feed off their every morsel with wordless devotion? I mean I think that's desirable given the compunction of many talented new indie developers to establish themselves as the next Fnaf, ("Capital Letters" "Big News Story") if not in 'gameplay' than in 'public perception' so that they may one day aspire to that holiest of holies; a MatPat GameTheory video.

MatPat made a video himself talking about this phenomena and the effect it has on budding indie game development, as well as asking the question of whether or not the pursuit of theories was ruining games themselves. I don't necessarily agree with a lot of the higher philosophies of MatPat, I think his occupationally relevant mathematics-tipped viewpoint gives him a tendency to whittle down complex webs of modern internet trends into a numbers game, which is a necessary measure for quantification no doubt, but when he feeds that sort of osteoporotic backbone into a solution using reductionist hypothesis honing rhetoric, it becomes easy to lose the big picture under the rigidity of his peculiar branch of 'The scientific process'. But here I must agree; I think the pull of theory crafting has influenced, if not ruined, a large swathe of the better indie developers out there and whatsmore we can see this evidence nakedly on the products themselves. I've seen it more and more with each passing fad horror game, and here are some examples.

Now that Poppy's Playtime has meandered into it's second episode, we can really start to see this model of game development take hold. Because afterall, Poppy is an official hit now! It shifts merchandise and everything! But the actual gameplay here is little more than a walking adventure with a smattering of insultingly simplistic logistics puzzles, some admittedly nice animations and maybe a chase section at some point. A 'one and done' sort of affair. If they want the game to have 'staying power', it needs to feel like there's depth beyond the slightly lack lustre gameplay spread. And so comes the NFT lore bits that drums up controversy and disgust all to apparently tease the nothing-burger tip that 'Mommy is coming'. (She's literally the monster if Chapter 2; that's hardly a smoking gun.) But I even see the obvious hints of this narrative lean in the episode itself.

As if in direct answer to the lack of compelling narrative present in the first episode, Poppy Playtime has a few videos that just spell out relevant lore in a documentarian fashion. (Because you know, all those toy companies out there just love self-producing autobiographies on their boring founders. It happens all the time.) One video in particular announced and then blurs the face of the sole creator. Why? What does that achieve? I mean it creates mystery around what this enigmatic and important figure in the poppy universe looks like; but when is there an actual video within the game's universe that has been specifically edited to blur out the face of the creator? Just lying on the floor in an abandoned toy shop? It's a mystery, no doubt; some might even considering it a fascinating conundrum; if it wasn't for the fact that we know there is no sensible reason. At the end of the day it's a mystery hook, fed on a line to the community. It feels blatant and uninspired, which in turn makes it less appealing and un-immersive. The same with the line-up of tunnels all leading to various workplaces and all labelled with the name of the managers they belong to. All except one who's words have been knocked off the wall and lay scattered on the floor. You can just hear the developer going "Look at this one! Go one, pick up the words and arrange them! I wonder if it spells out 'Cassidy'... names are exciting, aren't they?" The desire is there, but the passion feels borrowed.

Hello Neighbour is perhaps the most eyewatering example of this phenomena, in that we all know the sins of the developers as it was splayed to on social media for everyone to see. This is a game that began life with an interesting premise of an evolving AI pursuant but lost itself to vague symbolic imagery with the most cookie-cutter pay-off imaginable come release. All because MatPat made a theory video in its early Alpha days and that influx of critical observation totally overhauled the purpose behind development. We even saw some shameful moments where a certain member of the team was literally tweeting at MatPat trying to goad him into making another theory fodder video, all to justify their whisky washy 'mystery' building meta goals. All as the raw gameplay which original caught fan's attention seemed to slip to the wayside and end up feeling pretty unpolished. I'd argue theories did kill that game.

And theories may been behind the success of Bendy and the Ink Machine, if a lot of it's jank and inconsistencies. (It did pretty well despite it's significant content lacking hang-ups in the content of the game beyond being an interactive walk-around.) The development team here actually listened heavily to the feedback of their audience to not only work on elements that people thought the game was missing, but to literally tell the team what to put into the episodes inbetween. These developers went in with an idea of how their adventure would start and how it would end, and the people filled in the blanks inbetween by falling in love with Alice Angel one episode, or writing fan theories about Boris in another episode. There's nothing inherently wrong this approach to storytelling, in fact I practise it myself and so I'm inclined to defend it. But the whole 'crowd sourcing for direction' thing might be a better idea on paper. The whole meta narrative of Joey Drew's life story falls entirely to the wayside in the middle episodes so that we fall into 'fan fiction feeling' side adventures with these bizarre and not entirely developed characters which doesn't really feel like it contributes to the themes or narrative by the end of the story. The entire breadth of the game feels like a diversion because theories and fan demands pulled it around a bit with seemingly no central director. (Even though I know the game did have a director! What was he doing?) Taking ideas for you game is fine, in fact I'd say it's great; but crowd sourcing filler for your narrative is how you get... well 'Bendy'; a game that feels like a fan-rewriting of Undertale. (A prospect I shiver to even imagine.)

Lastly we have FNAF Security Breach, and this is an example I more leave to MatPat's observations to justify. It's fairly obvious to see that Security Breach was something of a rush job, from the copious numbers of bugs skittering across it's metal frame to the abrupt cartoon panel epilogue adorning all but the truest of true endings. Matt has a hypothesis for why that could be which he shared in his video on the topic, and it really does make some sense. In the lead up to Security Breach there was a great influx of theorists across the Internet speculating on what the story may hold, and they came up with several realistic theorems as to who certain characters would be, where their roles would lead them and even how the game itself would wrap up. A lot of these theories were based on logical and satisfying narrative progression, and thus the conclusions they drew were not only logical; a lot of them felt like best case scenario depictions of where Security Breach could take FNAF. Matt seems to think that this spooked Steel Wool Studios, who want so desperate to own their story and surprise their audience, which led to the narrative being kept liquid until the last possible moment of development, resulting in a final game that feels disjointed and ill-fitting towards it's own narrative. FNAF VR spent a whole game telling the story of Vanessa becoming the Bunny-killer Vanny, only for Security Breach to half-heartedly throw a twist ending where they aren't the same person but instead... two completely identical blonde women? Pretty much every ending has this logical progression that feels ripped out to fit in a surprise reveal that doesn't really make sense, to the extent that even the canonical ending kind of falls flat. Oh, this whole complex it built on-top of Fazbear Frights? And Afton is burnt to death again? The "I always come back!" guy? The one who has been burnt to death twice beforehand? Something tells me he ain't gone. Just a hunch.

There is nothing wrong with inspiring an audience to such a degree that they want to theories on your work and interact with it in a meaningful way, but I think when you start to let that influence what it is you're creating it threatens to infect and sometimes sully the creative process unless you're very disciplined with yourself. Loyalty should always lie first and foremost to the piece of art itself, above even the fans that have attached themselves to it, and if you respect what you're working on and the audience you've developed you own it to stay that course. Theory begging is not only kind of cringe-worthy, it's sometimes a detriment to the entire creative process that poisons once great ideas for the wrong reasons of being more talked about instead being a talk-worthy product to begin with. 

The secret truth behind Forza Horizon!

The pieces all fit!

Recently I went into my history with the noble sport of racing- in video games, and the great amount of respect I hold for them. One of the leaders in the video game racing market is undoubtedly the Forza franchise. Turn 10 studios have spent the last decade in bridging the gap between casual racers and dedicated simulators and I feel they have struck quite a unique balance. Not to mention the fact that the games themselves have consistently been at the forefront of visual fidelity and yet, impossibly, the games themselves haven't become increasingly shallow. Plus, they have endeavoured to ensure that UGC (User generated content) remains easy to make and share, so that's pretty cool too.

But I'm not here today to commend Turn 10 for their creative work ethic, I'm sure their egos will be fine without my stroking. I'm here to take a conspiratorial look at the lore of their spin off series under the Forza brand; Forza Horizon. If Motorsport is the game for racing enthusiasts who want to push supercars to their limits, then Horizon exists purely for the car nuts who love to look at the prettiest supercars in the prettiest environments and maybe take a few screenshots along the way. Personally, I am more a fan of the latter series, even if I do sometimes gag at the cutscenes.

Unlike most racing titles, Forza Horizon boasts a storyline to follow, and unlike Need For Speed, said storyline isn't packed to the brim with FMVs. Although that doesn't save the thing from being more cringy than your average Facebook feed. In Forza Horizon, you play the role of a participant of the exclusive 'Horizon festival', a car junkie event wherein people travel to beautiful and remote locations all over the world, usually a bus-ride away from tourist hotspots, and show off their multimillion dollars worth of vehicles in endless vanity events and races. So as you can imagine, this is a festival for rich asshats to pat the backs of other rich asshats, on account of them both being rich.

In gameplay this narrative translates to the player being mic-ed up to the most obnoxious event organizer of all time as they are herded across the country side on an overblown ego trip. Needless to say, I hate every single person who has a hand in the Horizon festival; It is my dream for Turn 10 to have a crossover with IOI so we can get a Hitman level wherein we get to murder each and every last one of them. Maybe it's the obnoxious over-enthusiasm that you get blown through your ear every 10 minutes, or maybe just the general air of pampered entitlement that exudes from the participants, whatever the source of my irritation, the consequence is that I have trouble enjoying the games unmuted.

My animosity has benefited me a unique view when it comes to the world of Forza Horizon, however. Unique in that, I look into it a lot more than the developers likely intended for. But I have found that the more I play through these games, the more questions I end up having. Perhaps it is my love for the Deus Ex franchise coming through (I feel another Deus Ex marathon coming in the near future), or perhaps I picked up on some deep-seeded lore that Turn 10 have been hiding since the beginning. Unlikely, but it makes the subject no less interesting. (At least to me.)

Firstly, I made note of how, logistically, the Horizon festival is unlike any other of it's kind. I don't mean that in a congratulatory way, I mean to say that the way the Horizon festival is run does not compute with other famous historical festivals. Let's compare it with, arguably, the world's biggest festival; Glastonbury. (Yes, I realize that Glastonbury is a music festival but we're focusing on pure logistics here.) According to an article by Glamour UK from 2017, the event's organizer, Micheal Eavis said that the event's costs total up to 22 million. That covers "The infrastructure, the fencing, the roads, the water and the loos, the marquees, the management, the security and the police." All bare essentials in order to get things to work.

If we use Glastonbury as a baseline example of a public festival that is run somewhat competently, than we can estimate the price that each Horizon festival has cost. First let us look at the space that both festivals take up and scale costs proportionately (Not the most accurate way of taking all variables into account but it'll have to make do.) In terms of physical size, Glastonbury takes up 900 acres of land or 1.4 Square miles. (Rather the venue!) Let us compare that with the size of Forza Horizon's maps. It was hard to find any data on the square miles worth of playspace in the first two games (Colorado and Italy + France), but some clever individuals did figure out that data for the latter two (Australia and the UK) Horizon 3 boasts up to 23.32 Square miles whilst 4 has 27.59.

That would mean that the Australia Venue would cost somewhere around 363 Million, whilst the UK retreat would be 430 Million. Astronomical prices to host a festival alone, however, there is another factor to take into account. You see, Glastonbury only takes place over 5 days, whilst the Horizon festivals operate on a unspecified timescale. However, I have heard the 'banter' of the event organizer rattle around in my skull enough to have the term "Summer of Horizon!" ingrained into my greymatter, so we can assume it is around 3 months. So, if we take into account that Summer consists of roughly 92 days, and assume that Horizon runs from start to finish (Unlikely to be the case, but it'll give us a ballpark from which we can work with.) That means that the Australian Horizon festival cost somewhere close to £6.6 billion to organize. (Or $8 Billion as of the writing of this blog.)

As insane as that figure is, things get ridiculous when we take Horizon 4's cost into account. You see, Horizon 4 introduced a new gimmick into the game wherein every week the season would change in order to allow players to experience a variety of different terrains and visual styles. (And it consequently still looks stunning) This would mean that the UK venue would have to have run for at least an entire year. (Good god, those poor caterers.) Taking this into account, as well as the widely known knowledge that the average year consists of 365 days, we can conclude that the UK Forza cost at least £31 billion. (OR $37.9 billion as of the writing of this blog.)

What does all this math tell us? That the organizers of this event are not just some thrillseeking millennials driving rental supercars, they are people with enough capital to run a small country. (An extremely small country, but still.) This clashes with the happy-go-lucky attitude that we see presented by the event organizers, or at least the attitude we see displayed by the people we are told are the event organizers. In the fourth game, the big narrative twist is the fact that the player themselves are the organizer of the Horizon festival. "That sounds like a lot of work!" you may think, but really, all it amounts to is racing around fast cars all day and trying to win medals. (Exactly the same thing you end up doing in all the other games.) This makes it clear that these 'organisers' aren't actually in charge of anything at all. They are a young face that are installed for the sake of keeping up appearances, so that the real planners can operate anonymously.

That seems like a bold accusation, but I have a bit more evidence. You see, the organization of the Horizon festival isn't just an amazing exercise in spending power, but political power as well. There is a reason why every single racing event in the world takes place on a race track; it is a safe and maintained environment wherein few people are ever in actual danger (beyond the drivers.) The tracks themselves are sectioned off from the general public, they are installed with measures to limit the effects of a crash, and the road itself is specially treated to withstand the beating of superheated rubber, day in and day out. Yet somehow, the Horizon festival does not follow these rules.

Every single Horizon festival takes place on the roads of some remote location across the world, the same roads that the general public are still using. It isn't an uncommon sight, when travelling from one event to the next, to see trucks and sedans populating the highways whilst supercars weave inbetween them. Supercars which, by the by, are not all entirely road legal. Some of the events and races even take place on highways and roads that the planners didn't even bother to section off (or didn't section off on purpose) meaning that locals are unwittingly drafted into a deadly street race without their consent. Who allows this to happen?

Whenever there is, inevitably, a horrific collision with a member of the public, you'll notice that no emergency services are ever called. No Ambulance, no police, not even the AA bother to show up in order to tow the poor fools away. It is as though the parameters of the festival have temporarily become an independent state for the duration of the festivities, and all civilians unlukcy enough to be caught in the mess are no longer the concern of their local government. Such an arrangement would surely transcend the boundaries of financial accessibility, (or should I saw 'ideally') which must mean that the Horizon festival runners have unmatched political pull all over the world.

Such a theory is supported by the setting of the second game. As I mentioned earlier, Forza Horizon 2 takes place in Italy and France. Both of them. That means the Horizon money men were able to negotiate a deal wherein they could set up a festival/temporary independent nation, that transcended international borders. No amount of money can buy that kind of power, it's the kind of influence that can shift the lines of the globe, should they so choose.

So what does all this ultimately mean for the Horizon festival? Well, it is clearly run by some sort of ultra influential secret cabal. Just look at the evidence. The festival is always run in a remote location that is close to well known landmarks (Easy to reach but not directly in prying eyes), they employ a revolving door of patsy organizers (A young attractive face to draw all the attention), Police and government resources are kept far away from the event at all times (To limit the temptation for surveillance and spies) and the whole event takes place over large spans of time. (As if to obfuscate the schedules of the real power players.)

I believe that the Horizon festival is a front that is set up by a shadow cabal of comparable influence and resources to what is assumed to be at the alleged disposal of the rumored 'Illumanti'. The festival itself is designed to be this huge, obnoxious affair, with the intention of providing a smoke screen so that 'the cabal' can host their annual get-togethers. As their members would likely consist of people from all walks of life, and branches of government, it is essential that their participation in 'Cabal' meetings are kept perpetually secretive, and so the Horizon festival was devised as a way for them to 'hide in plain sight' as they meet and decide the future of the world from secret boardrooms. Never in the same place twice. Then, IOI will do a crossover with Turn 10 wherein 47 will infiltrate this cabal, likely revealing them to be branch of Providence, and eliminate them all. (Wait, I trailed off a little bit there towards the end.)

At the end of the day, I don't really believe any of this to be the real story behind the Forza Horizon series. (Unless it is, in which case: I never doubted for a second!) I just think that it is really funny to take a critical eye to a world that is inherently not designed to withstand it. Poke hard enough and you can unravel a thread that leads you to some weird places. (Like the Illuminati.) At the end of the day, I just wanted to have a bit of fun and I hope you got as much of a kick out of reading my conspiratorial ramblings as I did writing them. And remember, that's just a theory, a game the- oh wait, that's MatPat's thing...