By Tony EvansThe Daily Northwestern

I grew up with Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega Genesis. Like many American children, I found it difficult to relate to Mario’s working-class background and his thick Italian facial hair. Give me Sonic’s loop-de-loops and split screen action any day of the week.

Year after year, I loyally raced through the latest installments of Sonic’s adventures. I didn’t care that the jumping puzzles were frustrating and repetitive, or that Dr. Robotnik’s machines often defied the laws of thermodynamics. I was obsessed with Sonic. I fondly remember the years that my friends and I spent years debating whether Sonic and Tails were gay for each other. (In the end, we decided that Sonic was too dedicated to his work to love anyone romantically – man, woman or flying squirrel.)

Aside from the hours I spent with Sonic, I hated elementary school. My school was on the quarter system, so I was always studying for a fractions midterm or writing a term paper about race relations in “Charlotte’s Web.” Life was hard, but Sonic made all of my problems seem bearable.

Then, somewhere along the way, Sonic and I lost touch. It was sometime after I discovered Power Rangers, but before I matured into the artful ballet known as Counterstrike. As time went on, Sonic and I quietly grew apart.

Over a decade later, I was surprised to find that Sonic’s adventures had gone on without me. I saw him again the other day, grinning at me from the game racks at Best Buy. Part of me wanted to keep walking and never look back. As Fitzgerald wrote in “The Great Gatsby”: “The past is past, and there are some golden rings that remain beyond our reach. There are no bonus stages in the human heart.”

Yet something drew me to pause. Perhaps it was just the lighting in the store, but I swore that I could see a single tear forming in Sonic’s glistening eyes. Pausing, I turned to the game rack and browsed through a laundry list of recent Sonic titles. He had been busy while I was away. I saw Sonic Adventure Battle I and II, Sonic Rush and Sonic Rivals, just to name a few.

There also is the 2006 release Sonic the Hedgehog, in which Sonic marries the sun princess Elise and is murdered by the hedgehog devil Mephiles in order to release the ancient power Iblis from the sun princess’s tears and is finally resurrected to save the history of all timelines from being destroyed by Solaris.

I didn’t end up buying any new Sonic titles. Video games today have too many buttons and confusing stories about interspecies romance.

In my heart, I know that Sonic belongs to a new generation of eight-year-olds with complicated learning disabilities. But it’s good to know that my old friend is still out there, racing for an ideal that he can never attain, endlessly searching for the chaos emerald known as innocence.

Weinberg senior Tony Evans can be reached at [email protected].