A nice tweet is raising all kinds of opinions about the supposed presence of Super Mario in the first installment of Sonic The Hedgehog. To this day, we have already seen a large number of collaborations between the two most important characters in the history of video games, but was there a Mario cameo in Sonic during the war between consoles as a way of Easter egg? That is the proposal that Tanooki Joe leaves open in his publication, since the resemblance is at least curious.
A hidden Mario in Sonic
Yes, the idea proposed by this image may be taken with a grain of salt, but you will not deny that it is still curious. And it is that this user has just realized that, in one of the Sonic scenarios, exactly in Marble Zone Act 3, we can see how the cornice of the temples that appears on the stage has a series of drawings that seem to represent the face of the most famous plumber in video games.
I know I mention this every now and then, but have you ever noticed Mario in Sonic 1? pic.twitter.com/cU5sJ9IKM3
—Tanooki Joe (@TanookiKuribo) September 30, 2021
Using a little imagination and mentally coloring the area, you will be able to see how the graphics actually seem to match Mario's silhouette, mustache included. But nothing is further from the truth, since the original idea of ​​the level designers was none other than to represent two lions leaning on a column, an ornamentation that is probably inspired by some Roman construction or from another previous era.
What if…?
That Mario was present in a Sonic game in 1.991 was completely impossible. The fierce war that both companies started (especially in the United States) led the managers to create crazy advertising campaigns, where SEGA claimed to be the hottest and fastest console, with the porcupine as the standard bearer of the platform.
Any reference to the competition could only have conflicting and mocking overtones, so representing it in the star game of the moment was not going to be a good idea.
By the way, if you don't know too much about the history that took place in the 90s with the conflict between SEGA and Nintendo, we recommend that you take a look at the book Console Wars, which perfectly narrates everything that happened at that time since the perspective of Tom Kalinske, who was CEO of SEGA of America at the time.
Mario and Sonic together
For this reason, unfortunately this appearance of Mario in Sonic is nothing more than the fruit of the imagination. To come across the first encounter between the two characters in the same video game, we will have to go back to 2007, when Mario & Sonic was released at the Olympic Games for Nintendo Wii. This is the first time that Mario and Sonic have collaborated together on the same video game, a proposal that ended up taking shape and that has left numerous installments in recent years, including a rather striking arcade machine.
Either way, the waters have calmed down, and now Sonic and Mario are working together on more than one game. It would have been nice to discover this wink 30 years later, but unless the developers say otherwise, the templet drawing is nothing more than two lions.