Sonic Adventure: Three minutes of success

After the Master System lost to the NES, the Game Gear lost to the Game Boy, the Mega Drive… it kinda depended where you lived, the Mega CD lost to the PC Engine (so much so it failed to take off even in regions where NEC’s hardware was only technically present), the 32X lost to… Sega, if I’m honest, the Saturn—no matter where you lived or how much you loved Virtua Fighter—lost to the PlayStation, Sega desperately needed a win. A proper one. Not “it did quite well in one region”. Not “for the hardware”. Not “considering previous efforts”. Just something that was definitively better than everything else. It needed Sonic Adventure to blow everyone’s minds. The (roughly) three minutes of the first stage, specifically. This game had to spin dash out of 1998’s gates at top speed, the fate of the entire company resting on its shoulders. Sonic Team’s Dreamcast game, safe from the incoming PlayStation 2 for a too-short while, was going to show the entire world what the next console generation…