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Sonic was my guy. Not in the way Mario was everyone’s guy—Mario was reliable, wholesome, a plumber who fixed your pipes and saved your princess and never gave you a reason to feel weird about playing him. Sonic stood at the title screen with his arms crossed, tapping his foot like your time was being wasted. I respected that.

Sonic for Hire arrived in 2011 with the specific cruelty only nostalgia allows: a Sonic whose career has completely dried up, taking increasingly degrading odd jobs to pay the rent. Other game characters show up. The animation is rough in a way that feels deliberate. The whole thing plays like a revenge fantasy for everyone who watched Sega run the character into the ground for twenty years and never got an apology.

It’s funny because it’s accurate. Sonic peaked in the early nineties and has been coasting on original goodwill ever since, releasing games that range from mediocre to genuinely bewildering. At least the web series has the decency to acknowledge the fall.