Google has provoked the ire of the die-hard Sonic the Hedgehog fandom after a social media thread about the ol’ blue blur went strangely awry.
The Google Play Twitter account, which exists to promote apps coming to Google’s Android app store, embarked on a very strange gaming themed thread overnight. “Sonic, but as you scroll he gets older and older,” read the instigating tweet. This is fairly common social media engagement farming. People will hopefully click into the thread and scroll through. However, the thread went sideways immediately.
The first tweet in the thread spotlights 1991’s Sonic the Hedgehog, the oldest game in the series. If the thread was about Sega’s long-time mascot getting older as you scrolled, wouldn’t we be starting with Frontiers and working backwards? That’s to say nothing of the fact that his pal Tails appears in the picture Google used, a character that wouldn’t make his first appearance in the series until 1992’s Sonic the Hedgehog 2.
The longer the thread went, the more bizarre the mistakes became.
Fans had to get involved and did, issuing corrections via Twitter’s community notes feature. “This is Sonic as he appears in Sonic Boom, not 1993,” read the notes on a post that proclaims ‘1993 Sonic. Ok short king.’ “It is possible Google Play have confused it for the game Sonic CD, which did release in 1993 and contains a song called Sonic Boom.”
The community notes are worth their weight in gold. The first half of the thread is fact-check carnage.
Fans immediately leapt into the comments to express their confusion. What this a bit, executed poorly? An AI-written thread gone haywire? Even the official Sonic account was flabbergasted.
I have my own theory, which is that Google’s own search results have become so choked with garbage that presumably even its own social media admins can’t find the right info on Sonic the Hedgehog. (It’s probably just AI garbo though).
We’ve reached out to Google to ask what the hell.
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