Just as with any other mascot, success leads to one inevitability: merchandising. With recognizability, a character gains the ability to sell anything their face can reasonably appear on, and the snide blue hedgehog would quickly join Mario in the quest to do just that. it was at about this point in the series that Sonic became a viable merchandising franchise, helping to sell just about every lunchbox and backpack he could be used for. Four and a half games surely couldn’t be enough to justify his sudden rise to stardom though, could it? No, because in the interim between the releases of Sonic 2 and Sonic CD, came the DIC Productions’ Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon, something which would inevitably reach more children than the games ever would. In the years that followed, it would be accompanied by two more Sonic series, one simply titled Sonic the Hedgehog, and Sonic Underground.

                Simply put, no major, long-running gaming franchise survives off just the games. Pokemon is the largest franchise ever, and the video games are the worst selling part of it, compared to what merchandise, card games, and the anime rake in each year. At the end of the day, a game series can only reach those who both invest into the appropriate console, and continuously buy the games for that series. Especially in the days when these games were not particularly long, but still took over a year to develop, this meant losing an audience as the series fell out of audience’s minds for a while. You’ll have people coming back because they fondly remember the last entry, but that number decreases with each release, especially if the newest release requires new hardware. Sonic was no different than any other game in this regard, so it followed the template laid out by the three Mario cartoons of the 80s (and all the 80s cartoons that were effectively just toy commercials. I’m looking at you, G.I. Joe and Transformers). These three cartoons would ensure that Sonic became a household name, even in homes that didn’t buy a Sega Genesis. Marketable as the characters were, Sonic would come back to television intermittently in the decades that followed, in the anime-esque Sonic X, the reboot Sonic Boom, and most recently in Sonic Prime. And that’s without getting into the current live action film series. The quest to turn this hedgehog into a multimedia empire would also continue into several well regarded comic book runs that filled time between TV series.

                Branching out does not just mean branching into other forms of media though. Not when one is a platformer hero. Due in part to their ease of access to children, their simple controls, and their focus on a strong character design, platformers tended to be the most heavily marketed genre for quite a long time, challenged only by the shooters that would enter the race in the early 2000s. One doesn’t have to look far to see the iconic platformer protagonists that would spin-off into other genres after just a few games (the fourth game being the spin-off is surprisingly common). Mario has a whole host of sports titles, kart racers, and digital board games to choose from. Kirby only had a handful of games before Star Stacker and Dream Course. Crash Bandicoot produced his own party and racing games after three titles. Rayman had three titles before creating an arena fighter and encountering the Rabbids. Sly Cooper, Rachet, and Jak would all team up to advertise the Playstation move after three games apiece. And after the success of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Sonic would dive right into the wonderful world of questionable spinoff titles.

                To be frank, there were quite a few spin-offs during the 90s, too many for me to give an accurate summation of them all within the next year. The point of this is not to review all these games most of you will never actually touch, but to examine all the different roads Sonic followed before his next major title (which would be Sonic Adventure in 1998). In the five year gap between Sonic & Knuckles and the release of Adventure, we saw Sonic and friends experiment quite a bit.

                First of all, Sega had roughly defined a core series cast of Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Eggman, and occasionally Metal Sonic by this point. While some combination of these characters would invariably make up the main cast of all these spin-offs, we also saw quite a few other characters come and go for very brief appearances. Robotic versions of Sonic’s friends would appear in racing title Sonic R, Sonic the Fighters would introduce a new group of one-off characters never to be seen again, Knuckles Chaotix introduced the six members of Team Chaotix (which would be whittled down to three members in their next appearance), and Sonic Underground basically made up a new who never appeared in the games. These characters were clearly all attempts at expanding the series past Sonic’s lone appeal. Tails and Knuckles would each receive titles to star in during this time, such as Tails’ Adventure and the forementioned Knuckles Chaotix. In spite of the popularity of these characters, low sales proved that neither could carry a series on their own. Amy would never receive her own title, and largely survived this era by being the easiest way to add a girl to the multiplayer roster, before becoming a real character in the Adventure games. Amongst the rotating cast of the other spin-offs, most of the characters would vanish from the series very shortly afterwards. A few of them, such as Fang the Sniper, would be resurrected years later as cameos in games that called back to the series history (Generations and Mania), and the only ones who gained any staying power would be the main Chaotix trio, who would become mainstays in the series during the mid-2000s, and the mechanical Tails Doll from Sonic R, who never appeared in another game, but did enjoy internet popularity as a creepypasta villain (a characterization that would eventually be canonized when the doll made a surprise appearance in the comics). Ultimately, Sega was unable to find that character who could lead a spin-off series during this time.

                But that didn’t stop them from testing ever genre they could reasonably fit Sonic into. His high speed naturally lead to an attempt a racing title, Sonic R. While often derided for its poor balancing and lack of content, this free-roaming racer has quite the legacy, as it would be the first of several racing games with Sonic’s face on the cover. Years later, the idea would be revisited in the Sonic Riders series, as well as in Sonic & Sega All Stars Racing, where Sonic would headline alongside a cast of lesser Sega heroes like Alex Kidd, Ulala, and Amigo. Interestingly, R would be the only game to actually put Sonic and co. on foot, with all of the later racers giving them some sort of vehicle or hoverboard instead. There’s something to be said for making the race fair, but the concept has always been one that deserved a revisit,.

                Speaking of spin-offs that would see follow-ups later down the line, Sonic the Fighters was an attempt at a traditional arcade fighting game. It was rough around the edges to be sure, but would be well remembered enough for Sega to revisit the idea with arena fighter Sonic Battle some years down the line. Of course, that game didn’t see any sequels, and Sonic has otherwise avoided the genre, barring his appearance in Super Smash Bros. Perhaps we can say the speedy character was better suited to racing than he was to fighting.

                This era would also see experiments in puzzle games, primarily by painting one of the cartoons over Puyo Puyo and repackaging it in the US as Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine. This one gets referenced a bit more often, most notably when a boss fight recreates it in Sonic Mania, but is ultimately just one of several generic puzzle games that got repackaged under different brands during this time. It was accompanied by the surprisingly slow puzzle platformer Sonic Labyrinth, and the “not really a puzzle game but it could feel like it sometimes” Sonic Spinball, which was pinball with some very light platforming elements. Following up on these puzzle games was the least avoidable spin-off a series could have at the time: a Mario Party clone. Sonic Shuffle tried to differentiate itself by using a deck of cards to determine movement instead of dice, and it did have potential, but the barely existent minigame package prevented Sonic from seeing any further attempts at party games until the Wii. I don’t feel the need to cover Mario and Sonic at the Olympics, as it’s both from a different era, and just a minigame collection without much to discuss for either series. It can’t even properly mark the end of the two series’ rivalry, given Sonic’s earlier appearance in Smash.

                The most noteworthy title of the spin-off era would have to be Sonic 3D Blast, an isometric platformer that sought to emulate a 3D space before the technology for 3D was quite there. It reportedly began life as a prototype for the Adventure games, and but became its own thing so that its larger goals could be used on the Dreamcast instead, where the technology would allow it to achieve its ambitions. This one is the closest thing to a proper Sonic 4 during this era, though it once again suffered from the slow pace that plagued Labyrinth, something that just didn’t gel with the wider brand recognition Sonic had achieved through his various misadventures and outings.

                There were a few other games maintaining the Sonic brand as it had been on the Genesis during this time. These were the various handheld titles on the Sega Gamegear. Had the Gamegear ever held a candle to the Gameboy in the public eye, these might be better remembered, but most of them are long forgotten nowadays.

                While it obviously can’t be as in-depth as I would like, this about covers the spin-off titles of the 90s. There would be a few more years later, such as the aforementioned racing games and a DS RPG in Dark Brotherhood, but the series eventually became far more reserved in its titles. Barring the occasional racing game and a few trips to the Olympics, Sonic stayed fairly consistent in terms of genre after the year 2000. Did the brand lose its strength as time went by? No, Sonic is still probably the third most recognizable gaming hero, after Mario and Pacman. Did Sega clean up its act and focus on just making good, focused titles? Absolutely not, but we’ll get to the travesties this series produced at a later date. More than likely, this era of throwing every idea at the wall came to an end because Sega lost the console war. Following the commercial failure of the Dreamcast, and the introduction of new competitors in Sony and Microsoft, console development was no longer in the cards for Sega. And without a console to promote, the necessity of the mascot faded. There wasn’t room for a million Sonic spin-offs on someone else’s console, and development teams could  no longer be spared for such things when the main series games were better investments for a third party publisher. Still, Sonic’s media presence would not fade so easily, as he still had a reliable television series airing throughout the early 2000s, and the comics would fill time until he returned to the silver screen in Sonic Boom. The era of infinite spin-offs is long gone in the modern gaming market, but the era that spawned these titles is one that inspires nostalgia to this day, for when a company could throw an idea at the wall and quickly release a humble little game with no reassurances beyond the familiar face of their mascot. And Sonic would remain the mascot, because as much as Tails and Knuckles may have tried, they couldn’t be trusted to carry a series on their own. Though that is not to say that Sega wouldn’t eventually entrust this series to another character…