It’s funny, Sonic is one of my earliest memories as a kid. I had to at least be four years old because I remember liking Sonic before I even got into preschool. My exposure to Sonic seems to be different from those around my age. My first game probably should’ve been sonic adventure and seeing sonic X on tv.
But instead my uncle (who was a teen at the time) gave us his old Sega Genesis console to my siblings and I. It came with all these old games including Sonic 1- S3&K, spinball, and Meanbean machine. My siblings and I loved all the games but Sonic was the game we kept coming back to. Sonic 3 and Knuckles being our absolute favorite. We sucked at the games because we were all literally toddlers but it didn’t stop us from playing the games over and over again.
I remember the first time we somehow finally managed to make it to carnival night zone on our own. Which is a miracle because we would always die at act 2 of Hydrocity because of the moving wall and the drowning music scared us all so badly we’d throw the controller and run out of the room to hide until sonic drowned. Our little minds couldn’t handle the stress.
One day our older cousin and a neighbor kid came and beat all of S3&K for us so we could play any of the levels despite our bad skill issues. We loved the story telling of hidden palace to sky sanctuary a lot. And that’s how sanctuary became the most complex word in my vocabulary at five.
Anyway, my siblings and I all had this odd rule growing up where we just weren’t allowed to share favorite characters for some reason. We all just individually decided we each had to pick a different character from each other to be our favorite. My older sister picked Tails as her favorite and that started her love of foxes, my younger brother picked Knuckles, and I picked Sonic. Which was a funny dynamic having the older sibling play tails while the younger was Sonic. We made it work though. Playing The classic games never quite feels the same without my sister playing Tails by my side.
Also because for awhile we were stuck to only playing angel island to carnival night up to the barrel of doom we would take our time and explore those four zones alternate paths a lot. We also ended up making sonic and tails talk to each other while we played the game and gave them our own takes on their personalities. I remember vaguely my sister and I pretending Sonic and Tails were having a picnic in one of the levels.
I have a lot of sonic related childhood stories but those are just some of my earliest. Sonic was the first video game I ever played and first character I really liked. I thought he was really cool as a kid.