it was never good.
There's a distaste the broader culture develops around a property when they get the feeling that it has a fan-base bigger than what the quality of the thing warrant (see: twilight). If there's a franchise that has a massive, incredibly rabid fan-base but the entries in that franchise are all mediocre at best the go-to line is "that franchise should just get back to when it was good". And I'm here to spoil for you why Sonic doesn't get back to when it was good.
The problem is it was never good.
People aren't fans of Sonic bc the games were good. Most people who are fans of Sonic never played a Sonic game they liked, or even played one at all. They're fans bc of its marketing.
A 15 year old in 2009 wasn't posting OC bc the old games were good -- they'd never played the old games; they had never even seen an NES. They were posting OC bc before they had a PC with MS paint, their parents bought them coloring books & they spent their free time before they had a PC making Sonic OC on Sonic coloring books.
The games were never good to begin with tho. All of the best Sonic games of all time had exactly 1 good level each. Sega spent an obscene amount of time & energy marketing the franchise -- they even went so far as to collaborate with Michael Jackson in several ways (the character is partially based on him), but in terms of actually making the games they only put in the time & effort of making 1 good level for each game, made it the first level which everyone would play the most bc the game would kick you back to the main menu when you ran out of lives and then just shipped it.
TLDR; the games were never good, Sonic only had its fandom bc of the coloring books, there is no golden age of "Good Sonic Games" to go back to & if you've spent your whole life thinking or mis-remembering that there was you have been fooled by a marketing ploy.
i actually really like the first 3 sonic games & have defended them in these comments lol but most ppl posting OC on deviantart when they were tweens had never played the original 3 that everyone says were the only good ones bc they came out b4 they were born.
I think there's definitely a second wave of fans rooted more in the Sonic Adventure series than the 2D platformers.
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I played the original on the Genesis even though it came out before I was born. I grew up poor and there was no chance of getting the latest console or games, but I was given it by a relative who didn't want it anymore.
Why wouldn't they have played them? Emulators have been around forever, and the games have been rereleased a zillion times. Just because they weren't born early enough to have played the original release doesn't diminish their fandom.
bc they werent old enough to have played Sonic when it came out on the NES in 1983
NESticle came out in 1997 though, so the only people who couldn't play Sonic when they were growing up are millennials from 1984-1996