*audio queue* "Sonic! He's the fastest thiiing alive!"
You've been lied to! Just how fast as Sonic? Not as fast as you might think!~
Hello, Internet welcome to Game Theory; applying science to video games since April 18th of 2011
recently, however, a new gaming scientist has come on to the scene: the good folks over at VSAuce3
recently took a gander at a game series
I covered in episode 5, the Science of Sonic. But, instead of talking about the similarities between
Sonic and a real Hedgehog or four-headed Echidna [penises],
they looked at how running faster than the speed of sound would affect Sonic's body.
It's a great video except for one thing: it's wrong. Now, don't mistake what I'm saying; I can't blame them.
We've all been suckered in by the SEGA Propaganda Machine, but the hard truth is this:
Sonic isn't as fast as we've been led to believe. First, a disclaimer:
this is a video game show, so we're going off of Sonic's behavior in his games.
Yes, comic-book Sonic has run at speeds greater than the speed of light,
but comic books have also had Superman starring in a porno directed by a
Supervillain named The Sleaze, so forgive me if I take what they say with a slight grain of salt.
Besides, Sonic's started as a game character,
and that's the way we're gonna keep him. Now, to determine how fast he can run,
we need to find out Sonic's height. According to WikiAnswers,
Sonic stands at 3 foot 3 inches tall, or about 1 meter. Now,
I could just stop there and call it a day,
but since we all know how trustworthy
Online Wikipedia articles can be, I thought we should double-check that figure. So, to do that we turn to
Sonic 2006
*scratch*
That's right,
I waded through one of the worst games ever made just to bring you guys the most accurate information possible
about one of your favorite fictional characters. Now THAT'S dedication.
In this disgraceful pile of code, Sonic meets up with Elise here; part-time
princess, full-time furry who is probably the one responsible for this fanfic pic of The Blue Blur.
... and this one. And this-
Anyway, this seventeen-year-old stands at 64 inches tall.
Comparing their heights during this shameless display of inter-species romance shows that our
pedophilic porcupine stands at approximately
27/40 of Elise's heights. In other words, 43.2 inches or 3 foot 7inches or about
1.1 meters. Suck on that, WikiAnswers!
So, knowing how tall he is, is we're able to get a sense of scale of the world around him.
Using Sonic as our size reference, we can see that Act I of Green Hill Zone is approximately
236 Sonics long, or about 259.6 meters.
The world-record time for finishing this level is 25 seconds,
meaning that Sonic would have to be traveling a little over ten meters per second to finish.
To give you some perspective, every second
he'd be running the distance from the pitcher's mound to home plate... on a slow pitch Softball field.
*Gameshow Jingle* And that, my friends is our random piece of trivia for the week. (singsong voice) The more you knooow!~
Anyway, ten meters a second pretty fast, but nowhere close to breaking the sound barrier,
which is 340.29 meters per second if Sonic truly was- *audio queue* "Rolling around at the Speed of Sound",
he would finish a course and a half every second!
The speed run for the entirety of the first Sonic game would be less than a minute long!
Even if we assume that he's wearing his speed shoe Power-up, which triples how fast he can run,
Sonic is still less than 1/30
of the 340.29 meters per second needed to break the sound barrier.
Compare those numbers to Sonic's archrival: Mario.
By combining research from our real-versus-fake boob episode where we prove that Peach is 5 foot 10 inches tall,
we're able to calculate that un-super Mario is 4 foot 8. But not only is he the height of an Oompa Loompa,
unfortunately for him, that's also, how wide he is.
Mama, mia! Oh, that's a pudgy plumber!
To measure his speed,
it's 69 Marios to get to the first warp pipe, meaning the distance is 3864 inches, or
98.1 meters. Minimum time to get there: five seconds. That puts Mario running along the ground at
nearly 20 meters per second.
*scratch*
That's TWICE the speed of Sonic in his first game.
Let's make this perfectly clear: in both of their respective first games,
Mario is faster than Sonic. Blast processing, SEGA? more like ass-processing!
Needless to say, Sonic isn't- *audio queue* "...the fastest thing aliiiive".
But let's give the guy a break, shall we? Maybe he was just getting warmed up in his first games in Sonic unleashed
There's an actual speed meter that tells you when he's at his maximum velocity at the start of Skyscraper scamper
You're at max speed with maximum ring. Energy if we're to believe the game developers
This is the fastest Sonic can get here's how far he travels in a second
Did you miss it here it is again you?
Get a better picture. Let's slow things down
Notice that he travels the length of one large building since this world is called Empire City
It's pretty safe to assume that it's modeled after the empire state New York in fact I can even call out a very likely
candidate for the building in question since I lived one block away from it an average City block above 14th street in New York is
1/5 of a mile by one twentieth of a mile if Sonic was running the longer part of that block he actually would come close
To breaking the sound barrier as he would be travelling
321 meters per second but notice that sonic here is running along the shorter edge of the building meaning that at most
He's running 80 meters per second faster than before but still less than 1/4 of the speed of sound
Now I know what you're thinking sonic has the light shoes that supposedly give sonic the ability to run at the speed of light well
Even with generous estimation those moments are actually slower than this one, so the power of those shoes
Greatly overrated
But how about when Sonic has all the Chaos emeralds and turns into Nada shameless ripoff of Super Saiyan mode well?
Even if Super Sonic is charged up and shot for a speed booster
he can't top the 80 meters per second limit let alone the sound barrier at
340 in short no combination of Powerup booster and track can get sonic anywhere close to even
Half the speed of sound but most embarrassing of all sonic isn't even the fastest character in his own games
You know who is I would say tails, but he actually has some sort of crazy
Teleportation ability that I'm not going to touch here. No it's Dr.. Ivo
Nik across all his games try as he might
Sonic can't catch this guy in a footrace even when Sonic comes Adam and top speed
Robotnick is able to quickly Sprint away in fact in that one moment, Dr.
Eggman is going from zero to 60 miles per hour in
three-quarters of a second that's an acceleration
at 3.2 times faster than the fastest accelerating car in the world the bugatti Veyron Super sport which clocks in
2.4 seconds not bad for a man who weighs in at
282 pounds
But all over analysis aside, the moral of the story is this
Most versions of Sonic aren't any faster than any other game character
It's the way the game was designed and marketed that made us believe in his top speeds
Don't always believe everything you hear do the research yourself, and you might be surprised by what you find, but hey
That's just a theory of game theory
Thanks for watching