 A long time ago, before the invention of such modern conveniences as the iPhone or the stuffed crust pizza, Sega released a video game named Sonic, The Hedgehog. The move has widely been praised as a good idea, as the game was fast, fun, and taught a lot of oblivious American schoolchildren what a hedgehog was. Then, 15 years later, Sega released another game called Sonic the Hedgehog. This was, to put it lightly, not quite so popular. The game was bugger than a Beatles tribute concert held in a roach motel, featured loading screens that lasted longer than the average episode of Sherlock, and, to top everything off, featured a bizarre romance between an anthropomorphic animal and a human princess. But how did this game end up being quite so awful? This didn't feel like an accident. Surely Sonic Team had been actively trying to make something this utterly atrocious. This is the story of Sonic the Hedgehog 2006, a game that taught an entire generation of young gamers that eventually, your heroes will fail you and your dreams will be crushed into a fine dust by the inescapable horrors of the universe. The Sonic Team that created Sonic 06 was not the same Sonic Team that had created the original Sonic the Hedgehog. Many of the designers and developers that had created the games in Sega's heyday had moved on to different jobs, and now, apart from studio head Eugene Aka and a few stalwarts from the Genesis era, Sonic Team was staffed entirely by newcomers, many of whom had little to no experience making games. The team had just wrapped up on Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg and they were eager to do something new. With visions of creating a wholly new IP, the team started coming up with ideas for a sprawling role-playing game with a realistic art style. Then word came from the higher-ups at Sega. Enough time had passed since Shadow the Hedgehog and they assumed that fans had forgotten just how bad that game had been. It was time to reboot Sonic the Hedgehog yet again. The problem was that Sonic Team was quite attached to their new gritty, realistic fantasy game aesthetic. So in a move of staggeringly poor planning, they decided to essentially tape Sonic into the middle of what they'd already come up with. This should work fine, right? The team briefly entertained the possibility of completely redesigning Sonic, giving him realistic fur and presumably dead soulless eyes, but thankfully the world was spared this little trip to Uncanny Valley when cooler heads prevailed. Eugene Aka was very excited by giving Sonic's world a gritty makeover. He was inspired by films like Batman Begins and Spider-Man 2, where larger than life comic book characters were made to feel believable and real. So he decided he wanted to attempt something similar with Sonic. Apparently nobody felt it was appropriate to tell Eugene that this was a colossally bad idea, but then he was the guy who'd created Sonic originally, or at least the guy who'd taken all the credit. Sega's heads wanted this game done as soon as possible. Their Scrooge McDuck golden coin swimming pool was running low and they wanted to install some new water slides. So despite this game's scope and design aesthetic really needing more polish, everyone involved was stuck making Sonic 06 in just a year. Nothing seemed to be fitting into place with this rushed project. Even though the voice actors were already recording their lines, big parts of the story were being changed constantly, as the designers pulled stuff out of thin air to try and glue together a coherent narrative. Meanwhile the gameplay was over time getting worse. Every new fix the team put into place made the game feel less enjoyable to play. Eugene Aka could sense that trouble was brewing on the horizon. If he didn't step up and whip the project into shape, then his vision of a grand Sonic the Hedgehog reboot would end in disaster. So with the fate of the franchise on his shoulders, Eugene steeled himself, gathered his core team of senior creators to his side, and immediately jumped ship. Off went the last few members of the original Sonic team, forming a new independent studio and leaving everyone else to flounder without leadership. Through a process of banging rocks together and doodling with crayons, the team were finally able to cobble together a working Xbox 360 prototype to show to games journalists. They'd managed to fix a lot of the big problems with the game up to that point, improving the core mechanics and making the whole experience feel a lot less like pulling teeth. Yes sir, this Xbox 360 demo was shaping up nicely. There was just one problem. The game was actually being developed for the PlayStation 3. The Xbox version of Sonic 06 was intended to be a port of the PS3 version, so rather than implement any of the stuff that the team had built for their game demo, they threw it all in the bin and hurriedly ported the inferior version of the game because logic. Sonic 06 debuted to exactly the reception the game deserved. Critics railed against it, calling it the worst Sonic game of all time. Meanwhile, fans of the series, especially those who defended Sonic through some of his more recent blunders, felt entirely betrayed. And what happened to Yuji Naka and his team? They created the beloved platforming mascot, Ivy the Kiwi. Oh, you mean you've never heard of Ivy the Kiwi? No, of course you haven't. Nobody has. I am literally talking about her right now and even I haven't heard of her. The moral of the story is that sometimes it's a bad idea to rush out an unfinished game with a clashing art style. As a second moral, it's probably not a good idea to trust Yuji Naka with your car keys, considering how flighty he can be at times. There is, though, a third moral that needs to be stated. While Sonic 06 is almost universally despised, there are apologists for this game. Some people, believe it or not, actually like it. Enough even to create an enhanced remastered version of the game that fixes many of its technical flaws. It's possible to find something good even in the worst of video games. And just because one person doesn't like something, it doesn't mean that someone else won't be able to find the good within it. Sonic 06 is not a good game, but that doesn't mean you can't have fun playing it.