Sonic Runners

~ the eulogy ~

Start with how it died, because the death is the design. Sonic Runners checked in with a server every time you played it, including for the parts that were plainly a single player jumping over things. When Sega switched that server off, the app on your phone did not degrade into an offline version. It became a picture of a game.

Sonic as a name reached Turkey through the console era rather than through phones, and by 2015 I was thirty-one and working as an engineer with no interest in a free-to-play runner. So the distance here is ordinary and complete: wrong shelf, wrong device. What holds my attention is the mechanism, which turns out to apply to a great deal of software that has nothing to do with hedgehogs.

Sega announced the game on 28 december 2014 and soft launched it in japan and canada that february, with the worldwide release following on 25 june 2015. Sonic Team built it. It ran sideways and it was free, competent enough that reviewers mostly complained about the money rather than the jumping.

~ the dossier ~

~ the money model ~

There were two currencies. Rings you earned by playing, and Red Rings you bought with real money, which is the standard arrangement for making the second one feel like a shortcut rather than a purchase. Around that sat every other extraction mechanic available in 2015, stacked thickly enough that one reviewer said the game had all of them.

It worked on five million people well enough to get them to install it and badly enough that they did not spend. Internal Sega material later classified Sonic Runners as a stalling title on roughly thirty million yen a month. The comparison that mattered internally was Puyo Puyo Quest, which was bringing in about five hundred million a month from the same company on the same platform. Sonic Runners was not losing money in any dramatic way. It was simply occupying a slot that a better performer could have.

~ the day the servers stopped ~

Sega gave two months of notice. Red Ring sales ended on 27 may 2016, the day of the announcement, which is the decent thing to do and also the legally simpler one. The servers went down on 27 july and the game came out of both app stores the same day.

Everyone who had bought Red Rings owned nothing. Everyone who had played for a year had no save file that meant anything and no archive. This is the part that should bother anyone who has ever paid for software: the thing was not withdrawn from sale, it was withdrawn from existence, and the copy sitting on your own hardware was worth precisely as much as Sega's willingness to keep a machine plugged in.

~ what got buried with it ~

For a while Sonic Runners was genuinely lost media. A commercial game from one of the largest publishers in the industry, released worldwide the previous year, with no playable copy anywhere on earth.

Fans fixed that, the way fans do. A beta test ran in june 2019 and a reconstructed server called Outrun opened in early 2020, followed by longer-running revival projects. The game exists today because people who did not own it reverse engineered the protocol and stood up their own version of the machine Sega unplugged. That is a preservation success and it is also an indictment, since the only reason it was needed is that the publisher built a single player game which could not survive its own publisher losing interest.

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