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This Sonic The Hedgehog Timeline According To Google Is Absolutely Cooked

Surely this is Badnik-generated.

Avatar photoBy Kieron Verbrugge

Today I woke up fairly groggy and out-of-it after a pretty late-night combination of a Ghost energy drink and too much Balatro, so upon initial inspection a seemingly-innocuous thread about Sonic the Hedgehog, published by the official Google Play account on X, didn’t register as anything out of the ordinary. As I slowly began to regain my usual level of consciousness though, it soon revealed itself to be one of the most bewildering sequences of posts I’ve seen in quite some time – and I’ve seen a lot.

For reasons still unknown, the Google Play account has decided to formulate a thread based on the idea of “Sonic, but as you scroll he gets older and older.” So far, nothing to think twice about. That is, until you actually scroll through the bizarre series of posts that includes mismatched images, outright fabrications and even a few obviously AI-generated pictures for good measure. Naturally, the community notes are going off, but it’s unclear how or why this thread exists – whether it was completely AI generated, put together by some poor person tasked with something well outside of their knowledge base, or it’s a (very effective) gag.

Let’s actually take a look at some of these, shall we? Because if I have to see them, so do you.

Post literally #1: Google says 1991 Sonic was 8-bit despite the very first game launching on the 16-bit SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis. Yes, it later released on the 8-bit Master System but that’s not the one most folks remember, or the example used in the image. The image also shows Tails, who wasn’t in Sonic the Hedgehog’s 1991 release.

Post #2: “Short King” Sonic circa 1993? No. Literally the tallest iteration of the character from 2014’s Sonic Boom and seemingly an AI-generated version of it at that.

Okay, well how about “1996 Sonic?” Surely Google wouldn’t get the world-class Sonic Blast from the iconic SEGA Game Gear wrong, would it? How about a screenshot of the 2013 mobile game Sonic Dash featuring the 2020 movie Sonic skin instead? Hell yeah.

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And look, it kinda just keeps going in this fashion and I really don’t want to keep looking at these, so let’s skip ahead to the final one for good measure (you can look at the full thing right here, if for some reason that appeals).

And this one’s actually almost correct! Google’s “2022” Sonic is actually from Sonic Prime, which started airing in… 2022! Yay! The strange thing about this one though, is the image looks like it was partially-generated by AI, or just weirdly extended by it. Stranger still is the full image is easily found online, and using Google no less, so someone’s fucked this one right up for no good reason:

So far, there’s still no rhyme or reason given for this debacle of a thread – the most recent thing to happen is the Google Play account reposting that last one. Even the official Sonic account is confused. And yet somehow, this feels like the most Sonic the Hedgehog thing ever?