Game Theory - Sonic is Lying...AGAIN! (Sonic Mania)

Episode Date: March 8, 2024

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he reveals the TRUTH about the Sonic Chaos Emeralds!

You know, a lot of people give Sonic a hard time for ripping off the super-sayan thing from Dragon Ball Z. And can you blame them? I mean, DBZ has seven Dragon Balls, Sonic has seven Chaos Emeralds. Dragon Balls can give you superpowers, and so do the Chaos Emeralds. And of course, there's the ever-important superpower of having golden hair. So yeah, it definitely looks like Sonic copied Dragon Ball. Until, you know, you look it up and you find out that Super-San form premiered in the manga issue that came out in August 1991, and Sonic was originally released in... June of 1991, several months earlier.

Remind me again who's ripping off who here? Yeah, it's still Sonic. The Super Sonic Forum didn't debut until Sonic 2 in 1992, but I totally had you going for a second there, right? Hello internet! Welcome to Game Theory, calling Sonic Team Liars since 2012. And today, unfortunately, will be no exception. Hey, it's not like I want to hate on these furry-tastic games. In fact, my fondish childhood memories are of playing Sonic 2

in the basement with my buddy Max and his younger brother. I was Sonic and Max was Tails. We would get together every weekend to make it a little further in the game. I would inevitably rage quit and his brother would be forced to sing Christina Aguilera's genie in a bottle to make me laugh and give me to keep playing the game. Now that I actually say it out loud, it was a weird relationship. Anyway, Sonic Mania is great. A game reminding me of my love for Sonic and my frustration with these, the chaos emeralds.

Because my other childhood hobby, outside of getting a young boy to sing Christina Aguilera songs to me in a basement was gemology. I was fascinated by shiny rocks, precious gemstones, and most of all crystals. In fact, I still have my collection to this day. It's also the reason why one of my favorite channels these days is JTV, hosted by my friend Natalie. It's a channel nerding out over all things gemstone, like what stones would power a lightsaber, and what is Game of Thrones dragon glass in real life? But the thing is, as a rock nerd, it always irked me that the Sonic games called these gemstones emeralds. Because I just don't think that they It is my firm belief that the chaos emeralds aren't actually emeralds. I've just never had the time to actually research it before

Until today because my job now is literally over researching all the little details and video games that bothered me when I was growing up So get ready loyal theorists. This episode is a genie in a bottle Come come coming at you now Far from being a collectible that you can ignore we now know that the chaos emeralds are objects of great power in the sonic universe I know sometimes it feels like they can basically do whatever is convenient for the plot at the time, but when you actually look at them across games, the sonic lore is actually pretty consistent about what powers these gemstones have. The two big points are, let's throw a list up on the screen right now. One, Chaos Emeralds are power sources.

I mean, the Chaos Emeralds are repeatedly shown to possess enough energy to power some pretty absurd superweapons, like Robotnik's Eclipse canon. And when they're not in the hands of the villain, they can also be used by the forces of good in Gaia temples. Speaking of Gaia temples, point two, they can absorb power as well as provide it. In situations where the chaos emeralds are drained of their energy, they can be placed on the altar of a Gaia temple to recharge through the Earth's power. In short, chaos emeralds are basically like epic rechargeable batteries. Lastly, we know their color. In the first few games, the number, color, and shape of the emeralds were inconsistent between games. But from Sonic 3 onward, well, at least until Sonic Mania, they were finalized as being seven brilliant cut gemstones colored red, green, blue, cyan, purple, yellow, and gray.

And this was always the thing that bothered me as a kid. I thought emeralds were supposed to be green, but maybe I was wrong. So that starts us off with the question, what makes an emerald an emerald? Well, emeralds are classified as gemstones, and technically a gemstone is a crystal composed of a single mineral. But it just can't be any old mineral. Just like snowflakes are specifically a crystalline form of water, emeralds are specifically a crystalline form of the mineral called barrel. But there's a catch. You see, there are other gemstones besides emeralds that are

Also barrel crystals. For example, aquamarine is a super popular gemstone that like an emerald is a barrel crystal. So what makes a gemstone an emerald as opposed to aquamarine when both are formed by the same mineral? One word, color. Emeralds are green and always have to be green, getting their color from small amounts of chromium as they're being formed. So hey, good news! Pokemon taught us all one thing, right? Emeralds are and will always be green. Bad news is that Sonic has been lying to us about that fact for literally decades. Which means I can technically end the episode right now. At the very most, only one of the Chaos Emeralds can actually be an Emerald. But hey, that's not a game theory.

That's a game fact. Thanks for watching! Okay, okay, obviously I'm not gonna end the episode after five minutes. Actually finding out that the Chaos Emeralds aren't really emeralds leads us to the even more interesting question of, if they're not emeralds, then what are they exactly? I mean, apart from color, they do all seem to be fairly identical. Same shape, same texture, same function in the story. It's not like Robotnik is all, I need the purple chaos emerald. No, they're all interchangeable. That tells me that they might belong to the same species of gemstone. Yeah, rocks have species too.

Now, they're mineral! Gemstones are said to be part of the same species if they're made up of the same mineral and have the same structure. For example, the crystallized form of the mineral corundum can be colored red, which is what we call a ruby, or blue, which is what we call a sapphire. They look different, but the Basic building blocks are actually the same. So they're part of the same species. Just like a terrier and a golden retriever are both part of the same species, even though they're two dogs that look different.

So emerald is a form of crystallized barrel that's colored green, but barrel is an entire gem species that comes in a wide variety of colors, which means that maybe the chaos emeralds can all be emeralds, but they can all be beryl, putting them in the same chemical species as emeralds. To find out for sure, though, we have to go down the color list. Green is obviously emerald. Yellow is Heliodore, a form of crystallized barrel with a golden color. Teal is aquamarine, which I talked about already, getting its light blue color from iron 2 plus ions.

Adding a few more of those iron ions turns it darker, and you get yourself a blue barrel gemstone maxi. Max, Max, Max, Max, 6. Maxx. And you get yourself the blue barrel gemstone Mashishi. Red barrel doesn't have a cool name, it's just red barrel, tinted with manganese. Fun fact, though, red barrel is about 150,000 times as rare. as diamond, selling for as much as $141,000 per ounce. Forget worth its weight in gold, red barrel is worth literally a hundred times the same amount of gold. So, uh, red barrel, rare, but

definitely possible. But here's where we start to run into problems. That darn purple emerald, which again is just an oxymoron. You see, purple varieties of barrel just don't exist. I mean, there are some forms of barrel that are technically classified as purple, like Morganite, But that clearly looks more pink and definitely not the deep, rich shade of purple that we see in the Sonic games. There's also the teeny tiny problem of Sonic 2 and Sonic Mania, which both feature a purple emerald and a pink emerald. And the barrel species has no solution for that. Plus, doing more research, barrel crystals in the real world behave nothing like the ways we see chaos emeralds used in the Sonic games.

I mean, when was the last time you saw an aquamarine gem used to power a weapon of mass destruction? Or even a weapon of minor annoyance? Long story short, it doesn't look like cast emeralds are in any way shape or form related to emeralds or its gemstone species. Which means we're back to the drawing board to find a gemstone species that does meet our requirements. That comes in a rainbow of seven very specific colors, acts as a power source and can be recharged like we see in the Sonic games. And those last two requirements are unusual, right? Gems that can charge my laser and be recharged themselves? Seem like just a thing out of science fiction or because of Vigia games.

But in my research, I actually actually, stumbled across a property of certain gemstones called Piazo Electricity. Basically, when you squeeze or heat up the gem enough, it produces an electrical voltage. The exact way it does this is way too complicated to explain here, but suffice it to say, a crystal that produces electricity when heated or pressed on enough sounds like the exact sort of thing Robotnik would be looking for to power his doomsday devices. This fact is actually supported in the comics. When the Sonic the Hedgehog comic revealed Sonic's origin with Dr. Robotnik, uh, sorry,

Back then he was Dr. Avi Kintobar. He gets fused with a rotten egg and becomes egg man later. That's no joke. Deep Sonic lore research gets to some really weird places. Anyway, the machine that helps make the chaos emeralds into what they are today is called the Rock, or retroorbiter Chaos Compressor, i.e., putting pressure on the stones to get them to spit out electricity. Cool! So with that established, only seven naturally occurring crystal families have this Piazoelectric trait about them. But one of them, one stood out. Quartz, aka the most common gemstone on Earth. Hey, I mean sometimes the answers are hiding in plain sight. Also, I know what you're gonna say, but canonics, planet Mobius is Earth tens of thousands of years in the future.

That's according to deep lore research in the comics. Like I said, the more you pick apart the Sonic Canon, the weirder and weirder it gets. Anyway, get this. Not only can quartz create voltage through its piezo-electric properties, it also works in reverse. You can place a charge across the quartz crystal and it'll produce mechanical motion by bending or flexing. Tiny, that are useful for sending information to a machine in a very precise manner. Kind of like a radio frequency. In fact, it's that exact property that led to quartz crystals being used in large numbers of different devices, like the quartz clock that was invented in 1927. Clocks that use a quartz crystal oscillator to generate a frequency so precise that these clocks are over 10 times more accurate than a traditional mechanical clock. And it doesn't stop there.

Quartz crystals also have the ability to store electric charges, something that we already talked about, talked about with the Chaos Emeralds. In addition to being used as power sources, Chaos Emeralds can also absorb power. We see it happen in Sonic Unleashed. In situations where the Chaos Emeralds are drained of their power, they can be placed on the altar of a Gaia temple to recharge them through the Earth's power. Court shares a similar ability. It possesses a high capacitance and is commonly used in circuit boards for its ability to store a charge. This would also help explain the Master Emerald, the gemstone with the power to counter or amplify the other emeralds. The Master Emerald, being a

larger gemstone would have naturally higher capacitance, allowing it to absorb the charges of the other smaller stones nullifying these other rocks. This is not a rock. This is a mineral for like the tenth time. Or transferring its own charge to a chaos emerald and thus amplifying its powers. So in essence, we found ourselves a gemstone that creates an electric charge, stores an electric charge, and can be recharged. All of these things just like the chaos, quote unquote, emeralds, which leaves us with one final question of color. Does quartz naturally occur in all the colors of the chaos gems? Absolutely yes.

Quartz, as a mineral species, comes in clear, yellow, red blue, teal pink, and purple varieties. They're all incredibly common. In an ironic twist, the rarest form of naturally occurring colored quartz crystal is praceolite, or green quartz. The reason? Because it gets its green color from being exposed to radiation. Oh, yeah. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that the chaos emeralds themselves are radioactive, but the fact that there are giant green quartz crystals on Angel Island

seems to indicate that there might be something radioactive there. Could that potentially explain how talking hedgehogs, foxes, and echinacellular suddenly sprung into existence? It would actually make sense. In the Sonic Origins' Comics, aliens bombard planet Earth with bombs intended to exterminate all life on the planet. The bombs melted life on Earth into a genetic ooze. According to official Sonic lore, DNA from the former human population merged with the DNA from the animal kingdom to form modern-day Mobians like Sonic and Tales.

That is the official Sonic origin story, ladies and gentlemen. Yep. I sound like a broken record, but seriously, the deeper you dive into the Sonic franchise, it is a dark, dark place. So what I'm trying to say here is that it would make perfect sense that these gene bombs would leave some sort of radioactive decay that gives us not only hedgehogs that can run faster than the speed of sound, but also the green quartz chaos emerald to rule them all. Now if you'll excuse me, plumbing into the depths of Sonic has given me a headache. I need to go listen to some Christina Aguilera.

But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Gotta rub it the right way.