Sonic, the Hedgehog, puts out his third cigarette in 15 minutes, crushing the butt into the novelty gold ring ashtray sitting on the armrest of his recliner.

“These things make it hard to run these days,” he says, laughing and coughing at the same time. I laugh with him, but I get the sense running isn’t high on his list of daily activities anymore.

“It’s not,” he admits. “I still do occasionally, when I want to feel young. But no, you’re right, it’s not really a priority anymore.” 

A few silent moments pass, as Sonic’s phone goes off and his attention is diverted to it. He curses to himself under his breath, texting whoever it is on the other line, before remembering that I'm still in the room.

“Where do you want to begin,” I ask him. There was a lot of ground to cover in our interview, and I wasn’t sure whether we should start at the beginning or work our way backwards. For Sonic, that’s like asking him if he wants to start at the top of the tallest mountain and fall his way down it, or carry a boulder up the highest hill. Either way, there’s going to plenty of scrapes and falls along the way, so I give him the option on where to begin our planned-two days of interviews.

“Shit,” he says, lighting his fourth cigarette and flashing a smile. “Let’s just hit the ground running.”

In 1999, almost 20 years to the date when I show up to meet Sonic, the video game star was worth nearly $50 million. By 2005, he was bankrupt. Sonic’s fall from grace became one of the most high-profile and public in the video game industry, rivaled only by similar darlings-turned-disgraces Waluigi and Randy Pitchford. 

Curiously, it’s here Sonic wants to begin his story. Maybe to get it out of the way. “You should’ve seen my old house, man,” he boasts, or laments, I can’t tell. “Had a loop-dee-loop from the master bedroom to the kitchen.” Or maybe it’s to set the stage for what, he thinks, will be his latest comeback. “Doom Guy lives in that house now, so I can’t buy it back,” he tells me. “But my next house will be just as bad ass — maybe more.”

It wouldn’t take much to live somewhere more “bad ass” than where Sonic lives now — a patio home on the West Side of Station Square. His neighbors are mostly retirees, the traffic is scant, so their Grandchildren run around the street free from worry of passing cars. All around him are similar suburban neighborhoods. It’s not really the place you’d expect the once-labeled Blue Dude With An Attitude, Hedge With An Edge, The Chili Dog Hog, to live.

His house doubles as his base of operations — the headquarters for Sonic's brand revitalization project. The result is, well, a mess. Legal papers litter every countertop and most of the available floor; dishes overflow from the sink; the Emerald Hill wallpaper, ostensibly once blue and green, now a depressing yellow from cigarette smoke; and crushed chaos emeralds powder fills the air. “It’s recreational,” Sonic insists. 

And maybe it once was, in 1991, when Sonic first burst onto the scene. After Sega’s former mascot, Alex Kidd, went public with his nationalist views in a now-infamous Playboy interview the prior year, Sonic was the company’s much-needed about face. He was edgy without being problematic, cool without needing censoring. He captured the apathy of Generation X, while also being at the forefront of the decade's emerging conversations around environmentalism and authoritarianism. 

Leading the Sega's then-newest console, the Genesis, Sonic games like Sonic The Hedgehog, Sonic The Hedgehog 2 and 3, and Sonic & Knuckles made the hedgehog a household name. He was a marketing manager's wet dream, his likeness turned into five different television shows, and even plastered on tubes of toothpaste, marital aids (I'll show you what true speed REALLY is!," the catchphrase read), and cans of spaghetti. 

"I was a cultural icon," he boasts. "I mean, I defined 'blast processing.' Video games come out on Tuesdays because of me, probably."

But no matter how fast you run, you inevitably trip. For Sonic, this couldn't have come at a worse time — the launch of the Sega Saturn, the successor to the Genesis. 

In April 1995, two months ahead of the Saturn's release, Sonic underwent surgery for a torn ACL, injured on the set of a Reebok Shoes commercial. 

"It was fucking stupid," he says, sounding still bitter over the 20-plus year old injury. "They wanted me to actually launch myself off a spring high into the air, do a bunch of flips, then land into a full sprint. When we do that stuff in the games, it's all CG, man. It's [not real]. But Reebok, they didn't have the budget for a special effects guy. So, they fasten me to this wobbly harness and have me actually try to do it. First try, boom! Torn ACL. Like I said, fucking stupid." 

After surgery, due to the excruciating pain, Sonic started self-medicating with chaos emeralds — a habit, he says, that began at parties in the early '90s but steadily progressed through his injury. He also got involved in a messy lawsuit against Reebok. During all this recovery, using, and litigation, he managed to make a few guest appearances on the Saturn, enough to keep a paycheck coming in, he says, but never starred in a tentpole title like he did on the Genesis. 

"It was terrible," he says. "Going from a high like the Sega Genesis and all we did there to having to be benched during the Saturn-era. I mean, it felt like it took forever for that whole Reebok lawsuit to be over. And, of course, my using was becoming problematic. My wife at the time, Amy [Rose], she was the one that urged me to make a change once all the settlements were over."

Sonic checked himself into the Dr. Fukurokov Memorial Rehabilitation Center in Mobius' Lava Reef neighborhood. He spent 60 days at the facility, away from press, Sega, and the limelight. He got his head on straight, he says. "I learned a lot in rehab," Sonic recalls. "I learned I don't need a substance to be me, that my using was getting in the way of my life and job. I kicked the stuff. Like I said, now I just use it recreationally. It's legal in 13 states these days. You know that, right?" 

With a clean head and a new lease on life, Sonic prepped himself for a comeback. He, along with a new school of Sega mainstays, would lead the charge for Sega's then-newest, experimental console: the Sega Dreamcast. "The line-up was unbelievable," Sonic says. "It felt like we couldn't be stopped. I mean, me, Ryo [Hazuki], Beat and Gum, Ulala, Seaman — God rest his soul. And of course, Sega bringing on Lars, Tom, and the rest of the Dogme crew to consult was brilliant."

Sonic starred in two new mainline Sonic games on the Dreamcast — Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2. The former of which, released in 1999, became the console's best selling game. 

Sonic Adventure marked a decided era of growth for Sonic and his crew. Increased budgets allowed the crew to film on location — a Dogme rule, mind you — such as Windy Valley and Ice Cap, foregoing the then-industry standard of shooting on sets. It also revolutionized the standard video game camera, opting to shoot on handycam for a shaky, unwieldy feel. Most importantly however, Sonic Adventure stood as an encapsulation of Sonic's career to that point. It was a game about a hedgehog wrestling with his place in the quickly-changing video game industry, wondering who he could be post-addiction as many uncertainties of the looming new millennia still hung in the balance. 

When Sonic Adventure debuted at the Metropolis Games Festival, critics were gobsmacked with the new take on the storied franchise, and it walked away with the Golden Echidna Award, beating out Julien Donkey-Boy which premiered just two days before Adventure's September 9 debut. Two decades later, Sonic still talks about the game as if it's his magnum opus. 

"After the Reebok thing, two monts in rehab, it felt good to hit the scene again with a knockout like Adventure," he says. "It's definitely my most honest game."

But the good times didn't last. Sega fast tracked a sequel to Sonic Adventure, but forced the team to develop it in half the time with half the budget. Worse still, the publisher mandated a focus on action and a bigger, fan-friendly cast. Gone were the muted colors and subtle dialogue of the first Sonic Adventure, and in their place something large, brash, and focus-tested to death. But it didn't have to be that way, Sonic says.

"There's only one thing you need to know about Sonic Adventure 2," Sonic begins, lighting a new cigarette and looking into the distance. "Everything good we did for Sega, everything we built, all the money we made them, they dismantled that shit in six months with that game."

Beginning production, the Sonic Team was willing to work within the budget constraints. For one, Sonic Adventure came in vastly under budget. Two, the original vision was to make its sequel a visual novel. As Sonic tells it, the original story featured him on a quest of self discovery. "We wanted to explore what it meant to be a hedgehog in 2001," he explains. "Keep in mind, this was a year or so after Y2K. All the paranoia, existentialism, and career crisis we bottled up into the first Adventure felt like a thing of the past. In the new millennia, we wanted to look forward, explore who we were with this fresh lease on life.

"But Sega — they were scared. I mean, Sonic Adventure made so much fucking money. They knew a sequel was a guaranteed sell for fans, but they didn't want to take a chance on the game [...] They didn't wanna try something new that might upset fans, so they forced us to make some changes. Why do you think that game opens with me breaking free from a faceless organization hellbent on my death, only to be chased by a massive, unstoppable semi also hellbent on my fucking death? It's a shame we couldn't just put 'fuck Sega' in the script, but I think we got our point across."

"I feel like you're dancing around the elephant in the room," I say to him. "Can we talk about Shadow?"

"We can," Sonic replies. "But understand, there's a lot of bad blood there. Some wounds — they don't heal."

Famously, Shadow the Hedgehog was discovered by Sonic Adventure 2 director Wes Anderson at the bar The Chao Garden in west Oil Ocean, where the former was slinging drinks. Anderson tells GQ in an email interview that he decided to cast the inexperienced hedgehog based solely on the vibe he through off while making drinks, saying, Shadow seemed to be the perfect "Yin to Sonic's yang."

"I was brought on to spice up the series; that's what Sega told me," Anderson writes. "Shadow had this allure to him, a danger. Sonic was an old man at that point — he was no longer the edgy hedgehog kids knew and loved. Kids aren't going to AARP magazines for what's hip." 

"Was he [Shadow] inexperienced? Yeah," he continues. "So was Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club. It wasn't his acting chops that attracted me to him for the role. It was his aura. I'd cast him again in a heartbeat, if he was still alive. [...] I don't regret my choice at all."

Sonic doesn't see eye-to-eye with Anderson. 

"Day one, this dude walks in like he's God Damn Mastroianni," Sonic says, lighting a cigarette, and raising his voice in anger. "Making demands left and right, berating Tails and the rest of the crew, refusing to do his nude scene. We all had a nude scene! All of us but him. And of course he convinced Anderson — idiot — to cast his girlfriend, Rogue. Well, we see how that ended up, huh? The Adventure 2 sucked, and then the whole thing with Shadow, Rogue, and the Hotel Chelsea went down." 

In 2005, on a press tour for his very own game, aptly titled Shadow The Hedgehog, Shadow and Rogue were found dead in their hotel room. Common belief is Shadow killed Rogue in a fit of rage, before ending his own life. 

Meanwhile, the ups and downs continued for Sonic — as they had many times in his career before. But this one felt different. Sonic relapsed, often making public appearances while completely incoherent. His friends Tails and Knuckles stopped talking to him outside of work, giving candid interviews about his behavior on-set. In 2006, he and longtime wife Amy filed for divorce. The split was bitter, with Amy taking custody of their five children, and Sonic quickly hitting the scene with his new girlfriend-partymate Elise The Third, daughter of the disgraced royal Duke Soleanna. He became a tabloid favorite, his life's follies becoming fodder for gossip rags across Mobius. 

Somehow, throughout it all, he kept working. Which is a feat in and of itself, but his games at the time are often considered not only his worst but some of the worst in the medium. This is especially true with Sonic's 2006 game Sonic The Hedgehog — originally billed as (another) reboot of his image. 

Sonic's behavior quickly doomed the project. 

Within a year of development, director Yuji Naka left, telling The Guardian at the time, "I'll never work with Sonic again, and no self-respecting director will either." Sonic often showed up to shooting intoxicated, unbathed, or not at all. He also — ironically, given his thoughts on Shadow and Rogue — forced the new director of the project, Shun Nakamura, to cast Elise as the game's leading lady. Upon release, and to date, it's Sonic's worst rated project, still brought up in conversations about the worst games of all time. 

"I mean, yeah, it is what it is," Sonic says, sounding regretful. "My life was a mess. I shouldn't have been working, but I had no choice. My alimony to Amy was — still is — through the roof expensive; she's taking me for everything I've got. I slipped off the wagon, but I didn't have the money or time to get clean. Not then, at least. And the whole Elise thing — she was a nice girl, but the world was a different time. She wasn't an actress, not used to the limelight, then all the sudden she's doing beasticalic kisses on camera? It was 2006, a different time. People were so mean to her about that. She was a good girl. Haven't talked to her in years." 

"I mean, the whole thing was such a disaster," Sonic says. "My wife and kids had left me, my friends weren't talking to me, every game I put out was trash and a half. I was a fuckin' joke, man. A wash up. A fucking has been. After Sonic The Hedgehog — the one we did in '06 — I called my manager, said I'm done. I told him, 'Ronny, I'm hanging up the towel. I've had a good run, but it's over.'"

Ronny, Sonic says, wasn't having it. 

"Ronny said to me, swear to God he said this, I can't believe I'm going to put him on blast like this," Sonic recounts, laughing. "He said, 'Sonic, if you wanna end up like that li'l fuck Shadow, be my guest. I'll buy you a room at the Chelsea myself. Or, if you got any fight left in your ugly ass,' he calls everyone ugly for some reason, term of affection I guess. He says, 'I'll pay for your rehab.' So I said, 'Alright, one more go at this whole thing. But if this doesn't work out, I'm booking the first flight to New York. On your dime, Ronny.' He told me he'd pick me up the next morning, and he did. I've been good ever since now, 13 years later. Just recreational chaos use — which is legal in this state."

Since this all went down, Sonic's maintained a lowish profile in the game industry. He's consistently put out games, some of them good, but he's not really the tentpole name he once was. And for a long time, he says, he was fine with this. "I was coasting below the radar," Sonic tells me. "My games sold enough to keep a roof over my head, cover my bills, and my image was somewhat fixed, so I was OK with not being the household name anymore. There was new shit for kids to freak out over, and I got it."

For a lot of people, this might have been the end of the story. A good endcap, our subject sitting back, enjoying a quiet life of getting old and retiring.

"But I got fucking bored," Sonic says. "I started to lose my mind sitting in this house every day. I started to think, what can I do? What will make all these idiots wasting time on Fortnite and Doom '64 remember that I'm a fucking cutural icon? What will make them recognize?"

"You know, I always wanted to be in the movies," he adds. 

Sonic began talks with Sega about a silver screen adaptation about his life and career as early as 2013. But it was a push to get the company on board, he says. "They were worried they weren't equipped to do movies, that it'd be bad," Sonic tells me. "I told them, 'You guys have never been worried about that when it comes to games, why care now just because it's on a different screen?'"

Sonic ultimately got the greenlight and carte blanche to do with the project what he wanted — hiring his own director, writing his own script, and overseeing the general direction of the project. One of the first things Sonic did was bring on director Jeff Fowler, a choice, he says, he made because no one knew who the Fowler was so he could hire him for cheap. "This is his first directing credit since 2004," Sonic adds. "I couldn't have asked for a better — or cheaper — deal." 

Next up, Sonic made a controversial decision to not cast his longtime friends and colleagues in their respective roles, even though he's playing himself in the movie. Oscar Isaac is playing Tails, Tadanobu Asano is playing Knuckles, and Sky Ferreira is playing Sonic's ex-wife Amy Rose. It's a star-studded cast, but one the hedgehog's caught a lot of flak for. 

"The internet will always talk," Sonic says, "but at the end of the day this is my movie. I'm in charge. I cast actors I trust in these roles, actors I wanted to work with. [...] No, I'm not worried about what Tails, Amy, and Knuckles think about how they're portrayed. Fuck 'em."

"You know, I've been working on this movie for six years," Sonic adds. "This is all part of the plan to get my name back on people's tongues. This is going to be the biggest thing I've ever done. It's going to make me a household name again. All these petty controversies will be forgotten once people see the film."

But when people did get a chance to see the film, albeit briefly, again Sonic was faced with a controversy. In April 2019, the very first trailer for Sonic the Hedgehog (the movie) debuted online. While the writing, acting, and directing also seemed questionable, it was Sonic's looks that caught the most heat from fans online. As Peter Travers from Rolling Stone wrote, "Sonic looks old, ugly, and like a train hit him in this new trailer. It's an insult to cinema itself to see such a haggard character in a leading role. This is surely all the convincing one needs to know this will be a bad film." 

"How did that make you feel," I ask him. "It was such an immense backlash. That had to hurt."

"It did," he replies. "But I get it. People don't want to think about all my hardships and everything I've been through — the stuff that really ages you and puts wrinkles on your face. They want to remember the young hog in the posters they hung on their walls as kids. Instead of getting mad, I decided to listen to my fans, really hear what they had to say. I took every death threat against the production team to heart, and their passion for tearing down the work of hundreds of people really meant a lot to me."

In what could be seen as a drastic move, Sonic decided to delay his film from its initial November 2019 release to a February 2020 release. It was an expensive call, one that needed massive amounts of reshoots, but a call Sonic says he thinks was right. Earlier this year, in May, a month after the first trailer debuted, Sonic underwent extensive, experimental plastic surgery to look 20 years younger. "I did it to look like the Sonic fans knew and loved," he says. "And I look great, so that's definitely a plus. I think everyone who was boycotting our film at first will definitely, without a doubt, buy a ticket now. I mean, if they don't, what was the point of getting mad? You know?"

And so, that's where the story ends. Two months from when I speak to Sonic, he'll debut the next part of his life and career, a movie that he says will make everyone reconsider his place in the game industry. Time will tell whether or not he's correct.

"Everything I did before, that was just building up to what I'm doing now, what I'm going to do next," Sonic says, sounding sure of himself. "This movie isn't the next chapter of my life. It's a whole different book. I'm a cultural icon, and people better recognize. I'll never die."

Header illustration: Joe Buchholz