When you have ADHD and impatient parents, you live day to day trying to avoid consequences. Anyone who tries to punish him for being himself never wins. The best part? He’s cool for living by his own rules. He’s never afraid to stand out and make a statement. Sonic the Hedgehog was and remains a devil-may-care, free-spirited wanderer who happens upon heroism in all the wrong places. Playing SA2 on my older cousin’s Dreamcast around the tender age of 10 was the first time I saw myself represented so clearly in a video game. Growing up with parents who were “not ready for an ADHD kid”, I came to feel the same way about Sonic.
Shiro Maekawa, the lead scenario writer on Sonic Adventure 2, once said that he feels “a deeper connection to than real family… he can’t think of Shadow as a separate person” (though he acknowledges he cannot perform Chaos Control). On my worst days, I breathe in and imagine myself there again, lost in the blue blur of xenon-gas headlights weaving between lanes. Just the motion, and our little fortress in time: a sanctuary that we could only find while zipping down the stardust speedway of Route 9 in Central Massachusetts. Any time between twelve and four in the morning on the weekends, I’d crawl into my family’s used Honda Civic, often with my two younger siblings in tow, and just start driving. There is a tunnel at the speed of sound where 16-year-old me could always hide.
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