Bite-Sized Game History: StarCraft and the Spurs, Behind-the-Scenes with Mass Effect, and Sonic’s Hare-Raising Origin

There’s a lot that can link two video games together. Sometimes it can be as simple as a few developers in common, but other times it can be an influential game mechanic or even a subtle in-game reference that hints at a connection between two universes.

What do Blizzard’s StarCraft, BioWare’s Mass Effect, and Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog have in common? Not much actually, but all three are featured in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History.

You can find a lot of dedicated video game historians on Twitter, and in 280 characters or less, they always manage to unearth some amazing artifacts. Bite-Sized Game History aims to collect some of the best stuff I find on the social media platform.

It’s fairly common in 2021 for pro athletes to bond with their teammates over the latest edition of NBA 2K or Madden or Call of Duty. This type of controller camaraderie was considerably less common in the late 1990s, but that didn’t stop the San Antonio Spurs from becoming absolutely obsessed with StarCraft during the 98-99 season.

David Robinson, Tim Duncan, and the rest of the players were constantly competing in 2v2 skirmishes in Blizzard’s classic RTS, and they even hooked up the LAN one last time on the team plane after winning the NBA Championship. Tested’s Norman Chan recently shared this photo of one of those matches (and yes, that’s the NBA Championship Trophy on the floor):

Speaking of beloved sci-fi universes, the recent release of Mass Effect: Legendary Edition put BioWare’s RPG franchise back in the spotlight this year. Animator Jonathan Cooper marked the occasion by sharing some behind-the-scenes footage from the first game’s motion capture session:

And while we’re on the subject of behind-the-scenes stories, the creation of Sonic the Hedgehog is certainly one of the most interesting to ever emerge from that period of Sega’s history. The consolemaker’s marketing department would ultimately land on a final design for Sonic that would endure for more than 30 years (notwithstanding an infamous film teaser).

But first things had to get weird.

Sega was desperate to compete with Nintendo, and multiple iterations of Sonic’s design were produced by Sonic Team in pursuit of creating a cooler counterpart to Mario. The “Blue Blur” wasn’t always blue during the development of these concepts, nor was he always a hedgehog. The character was initially known as Mr. Needlemouse the Rabbit (which you can see in these images shared by author Reyan Ali), and if that’s not wild enough, Sega even briefly considered making a Dr. Robotnik look-a-like the hero:

And that does it for this edition of Bite-Sized Game History. For more short-form history lessons, be sure to follow me on Twitter.

Author: VGC | John

John Scalzo has been writing about video games since 2001, and he co-founded Warp Zoned in 2011. Growing out of his interest in game history, the launch of Video Game Canon followed in 2017.