Play Game: The Home of the Strange Sonic "Game"

[Badnik Mechanic]

So for full disclosure, this video is mine, I made this about a month ago after researching the show due to the Eggman costume, but as is the way, made a few new discoveries along the way, or at least ones which nobody was taking much attention to.

I posted it at retro just over a week ago and figured you lot here would also find this of interest.

Anyway, back in late 2019, this started doing the rounds on Twitter.

That's Brazillian Eggman, also known as 4000 Pontos Eggman. The clip did Twitter for a few days and I decided to take a look into it, it turns out it's from an old TV Show called play game, so I decided to research the show since there's only a handful of articles of it online (all in Portuguese) and this actually has some significant and obscure Sonic history to it.

Let's get the obvious out of the way, what's the deal with the Classic Eggman mascot? Well... It's an official costume! Not only that, but it's the only official Classic Eggman mascot costume that I'm aware of, and it was exclusive to this obscure TV Show in Brasil. Due to the fact the show was made by Tec Toy, who had the rights from Sega to release Sega products in Brasil, it's an official item!

So I dug a bit deeper and found out that it also had a Sonic 'Game' made specifically for it.

And here it is.

As pointed out on Retro, it looks like those are the official 8bit master system sprites, but if this is a game? What do you do in it? Well... The game is basically a set of Hubs in a descending 'tree' pattern, the players navigate Sonic onto the different Hubs which trigger a few effects

There are other effects, you can see them in the video at around timestamp 6:00. Now, I'm pretty sure that these are faked for the TV audience, it's just an overlay.

But there are a few things which are the real deal. For instance, Sonic has a few animations, he walks, taps his foot, the stars twinkle and there's even a rocket ship moving in the space hub.

According to a behind the scenes article I found on the 'game' the contestants were actually controlling Sonic, there was also a few problems in that people would keep moving Sonic when they landed on a new tree node, which was hell for continuity.

See those giant joysticks? That's what actually moved Sonic. It was a genuine piece of software that they could control.

So is this strictly a 'game'? No.... Not not at all, if anything it's more of a navigation menu, and even then that's a stretch. But the Sonic fan in me wants to say 'this is the first example of a 'hub world' for Sonic =p

Now I linked my video at the top since it's a compilation of my research which makes it easier to digest. There is only 1 episode of this show online, whilst it is on YouTube, it's region locked to Brasil, so you'll need a VPN to watch it and I also don't have the link.

But this facebook mirror works just fine.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=480589812586021

 

 

[Solister]

Ok, first all, sorry for such late reply. (It's been over 3 weeks I'm procrastinating to watch this topic properly!).

I'm really impressive with your take on the theme. Even not speaking Portuguese, you seem to take each detail so perfectly almost as a native. I'm born in 2003, so I sadly can't provide much detail and even knew this existed (But not completely impressed as 90s seemed to be weird here).

As you probably have seen, people on the video comments section gave more details, specially (and sadly) that the host died a few months ago.

I can't tell precisely, but from a snippet I could see, this kind of TV show still exist in the same broadcaster, except with now general subjects themes. The host was the same and the "style" of it still being the same except for the futuristic look. For some reason my grandma loves this show.

But that's it. Awesome work here, people on comments (also Brazilians) could provide way more information than me. Even I who's a native and like Sonic didn't know about it. Thank you and sorry for the very late reply!