On The Beautiful and Tragic Weirdness of Sonic Adventure, Part 3: Apocalypse
Written by Zolani Stewart
Casinopolis is a concept too distanced from its reference to feel like a real place. As it moves further out into its own isolation, into abstraction and surreality, the question of Boundary starts to emerge. What are the boundaries of Sonic Adventure? More specifically, what does it mean to break something that never had a coherent concept of itself? Can you cross a boundary of something whose borders were never intact?
We can answer those questions by exploring the “glitches” in Sonic Adventure. I use quotes because I’m not sure that Sonic Adventure is a game that has glitches, or can be ‘glitched’. To glitch something, I think, is to antagonize against its concept, and to shatter, or put into question the credibility of its virtual space. But out of all the times I’ve fallen through the sand to my death in Emerald Coast, I’ve never once felt like I was breaking any overarching vision. When I spin-dash through a stone block in a wall with spotty collision in Windy Valley, and land in its eerie inaccessible back area with nil purpose, I don’t feel like I’ve done anything ‘wrong’.
The reason why I initially worked so feverishly to find these points was not because I necessarily wanted to “break” the game, but because Sonic Adventure’s glitches, its bugs, its broken points and spotty areas never felt like more than a natural extension of what Sonic Adventure already is, which is a game that has no coherent understanding of itself — but also a game that’s remarkably uncompromising in how it represents that incoherency. When I took the screenshots you see here, I felt like a tourist exploring a freakish virtual world, it was like opening up a whole other side to the game. Exploring Sonic Adventure’s bugs has only strengthened my love and appreciation for it.
Sonic Adventure is bafflingly easy to break. What always surprises me after months of playing it how poor of a job it does to conceal its own constructedness. I mentioned earlier the stone panel in Windy Valley, which you can easily spin-dash through every time, onto a small stone platform that will lead you into a stone-brick cave that leads into a space of floating platform roads that seem to be abandoned parts of the level never built on by its designers. But there are others, like the second checkpoint of Final Egg, where to leave its level bounds you simply move backwards up its incline to discover that the tube you are in has nothing covering its end, letting you view the freakish shapes and textures that wrap the vertical cylinder space. Or even in Station Square, where its camera will jolt to the upper side of the building with a downward tilt when you’re about to leave the Hotel half to obscure its transition space. But if you stand right next to the trigger area, and pan your camera leftwards, you will see that there is actually nothing beyond the road the game shows you. Beyond the point of what the game wants you to see lies only a skybox, an empty void that the cars will drive out into. And you cannot touch or see it.
But probably my favourite broken point, which is easily reproducible on any version of the game, is in Lost World. If you play the stage, and pass the checkpoint where you’re in an open space outside, then you must skip all checkpoints afterwards until you reach the large room where there are “gravity panels” that allow you to move up walls. If you go to the wall on the right, pause the game, and restart to the last checkpoint, the axis of Sonic’s gravity will remain the same as it was on the wall! And this will allow you, after a lot of effort fighting the controls and the game’s physics, to run on the walls of the structure, and eventually move past its level plane. Once you step past the edge of the space, you will “fall” through the entire level, clipping in and out of blackness, until you’re a long ways away from the whole stage itself, which should now be completely out of view. Now Sonic is in the middle of the screen, in an endless “falling” sideways animation state, but we can’t tell if he’s actually falling or if he is floating in the space. The camera serves no more use; I try to rotate it but instead it jolts ways above Sonic, and will immediately snap back when I release RB. And trying to move sonic around with the left stick gives me no better perspective of where he is and how he’s moving.
I think this is really is the only situation I’ve found myself in that I felt like I really broke Sonic Adventure. I’ve removed myself from every context imaginable and I’ve nullified every one of its functions. I’ve placed the game into a state of total staticness. I’m not just falling downwards in a skybox under the level —I seem to have broken the game’s understanding of its own space. I’ve somehow placed myself far beyond Sonic Adventure’s boundaries, where it cannot understand where and how I am existing.
Sonic Adventure’s Conclusion
Sonic Adventure has eight playable characters: Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Big, E-100, Metal Sonic and Super Sonic. Metal Sonic is an extra character who so far I’ve only seen playable in the 2003 non-steam PC version, and Super Sonic is only playable in the final stage against Sonic Adventure’s final Boss, “Final Chaos.”
In Sonic Adventure, Dr. Eggman looks to release an ancient creature named “Chaos” who was sealed into the Master Emerald by an ancient society of Echidna of Knuckles’ lineage a very long time ago. How Chaos was released and how Dr. Eggman got to controlling him is not clear, but what is clear is that Chaos is a creature who is understood as being fuelled by a spiritual anger, specifically of events that led to the killings of the Chao and the attempted destruction of Angel Island. Tikal is a character who failed to stop her community leaders from performing those killings. She failed to push back against the destructive, patriarchal culture that has been long common in Echidna history. But her spirit, literally, lives on in Sonic Adventure. She acts as the embodiment of the glowing hint orbs that we find in every stage of the game. We come across her multiple times through embodied flashbacks, where we visit Tikal and see Angel Island burn in flames. Chaos’ eventual retaliation on the “modern” world, his revenge from the events involving Tikal is pretty easily reflective of typical Native and Colonial Anxiety, especially with the very shallow and stereotypical references to South American Aztec symbolism, and its dark and hostile tonal associations.
Chaos’ final retaliation is the destruction of Station Square. Station Square is destroyed, and I mean really, completely destroyed — the entire city is flooded to the ground. All that’s left are scenes of infinite ocean horizons and drowned skyscrapers, so at this point it’s pretty strongly implied that everyone in Station Square is dead.
And there are always people who confide in me their confusion about the game’s ending. I think that many of them find it funny or weird that a game that feels so trite would pull something so sudden and extreme. But what better end for a game like Sonic Adventure, than Apocalypse? Sonic Adventure is a game defined by its fragility, it is an object that rips apart at its seams. The reality of Sonic Adventure — the subtext meant to convince us this is more than a collection of sound files and .pngs, model objects created in a script and raycasted onto my screen — is held together by the flimsiest of threads, the most blatant event triggers, poorly disguised transition spaces and jarring cuts to black. Hell, the game is barely playable if you use the Free Camera, because without its specific camera angles and paths built for every section of its stages, Sonic can’t properly orient himself about the level. At every moment, materially and conceptually, Sonic Adventure is a game ready to collapse on itself. And when it finally does, the aftermath is a moment of existential peace! The “Chaos” is tamed and sealed back into the Master Emerald by Tikal. And Tails’ final line, his marvelously tone-deaf “all’s well that ends well” says it all: Sonic and his friends couldn’t give two shits about Station Square. The game would rather its universe be put under water than have it exist in perpetual conflict with its own reality.
The prophecizing of “Chaos” eventual, inevitable destruction of Station Square is in parallel with Sonic Adventure’s realization that its reality cannot exist as it is. From its opening introduction to its rapturous end, the game is a process of coming towards this realization. It is the game’s own epiphany, one removed from our own desire and aspiration as players. For this reason I can’t help but see Sonic Adventure’s conclusion as one of the most important in popular videogames, as it concerns not its characters, or even its world, but an idea and a question much larger than itself. It reminds me of King-Spooner’s science-fiction epic A Delicate Time in History, or You Will Die Alone at Sea by Andi Mcclure , or Pol Clarrisou’s Offline. There’s a sense of a place that can not live with itself, an unstable reality that is always bent towards its own destruction, in every playthrough.
In that sense, Sonic Adventure has more in common with small artgames than one would realize. In fact, it wouldn’t be hard to place Sonic Adventure as a more commercial parallel to the 90s new media canon like Maurice Benayoun’s virtual reality works. Released in 1999, Sonic Adventure really is the grandfather of 21st Century Digital Weirdness, an aesthetic particular in how it concerns itself with physics, space, texture and materiality. It’s an early calling to the wave of surreal hyper-amateur Unity 3D games that are now the norm across Gamejolt and Warp Door and glorious trainwrecks. Car Park Dream, One Duck, Destroy Your House, RudeJumper, even games like Artpartment and Catastrophe; they all relay back to Sonic Adventure through a lineage, and perhaps, by extension, a group of quirky early 3D Dreamcast, Net Yaroze, and Arcade games made in Japan in the late 90s. Sonic Adventure is rooted in our contemporary relationship with the virtual space. Sonic Adventure predicts the subtext of the 21st Century Aesthetic, the question of realness, the question of authenticity, the question of nostalgia, and that of “clarity,” a construction we gauge as bringing us further or closer to realness.
So it’s a game with a lot of baggage on it. As a piece of Digital Art, as popular commercial art, and as a videogame, Sonic Adventure doesn’t have nearly as strong place in the minds of enthusiasts, critics and artists as I really think it should. Ironically, that probably comes from its place as a franchise title, a game thrown in as another old flawed 3D sonic game. But underneath all of it, I can still appreciate Sonic Adventure merely for how much of a fun and pleasant game it is to play. Sonic Adventure has inspired in me a whole essay of thoughts but its other achievement is how in every time I turn it on, its stage clear music manages to put a smile on my face. When I need to improve my mood, or when I just need room to think, I can somehow find solace in Sonic Adventure. It instills in me a nostalgia for its experience, a sense of place and comfort inside its broken, tragic weirdness.
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