Game Theory - Sonic's Rings Are A SCAM!? (Sonic The Hedgehog)

Episode Date: October 15, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he breaks down the TRUE value of Sonic's Rings. *Credits:* Writers: Matthew Patrick, RyeToast and Tom Robinson Editors: Dan "Cybert" Seibert, JayskiBean, Pedro Freitas, Danial "BanditRants" Keristoufi, and Shannon (Bomb0i) Sound Designer: Yosi Berman

Rings, one of the most iconic collectibles in all the gaming. They protect Sonic from harm. They give him extra lives. And most impressively of all, they fuel the supersonic state. Giving him insane amounts of power and an awesome soundtrack. For also the unofficial sound effect of gas station cash registers for some reason. Because of all of these reasons, Sonic's rings are invaluable. Or are they?

This says America, after all. Everything's got itself a price. Everything is worth. And considering that these rings have been used as a currency in past games, it means that these rings are no exception. The only question I'm left with, though, is Sonic a wealthy hedgehog or is he a broke boy? Hello, internet, welcome to game theory. The show that liked theories so much, it put a ring on it. Speaking of rings, the Sonic series is full of them. Blue rings, dark rings, dash rings, red star rings, you name them, they're there. But that's not what you're thinking of when I say Sonic's rings, is it? No, you're thinking about these guys.

the gold rings that are scattered throughout every stage of every game. For years, I've wondered how much these things would possibly be worth. I mean, they're just giant cold rings floating in the sky after all. Half the size of most of the characters in the franchise. You'd think that they'd be worth a pretty penny. But before I could even think about right in this episode, Sega did something I never anticipated. They gave us an answer. And they did it in probably the weirdest way they could have through a Roblox game.

Sonic Speed Simulator is an officially licensed game by Sega of America, and in it you can collect rings that can be used to buy items. Although instead of a shop like past games, this one actually uses vending machines, where you essentially gamble for random cosmetics. I would make a comment about how all of this is being targeted at children, but then again, Sonic ain't exactly new to the world at casinos. Anyway, in the game, Sega offers you the chance to buy rings using Robox, the in-game currency of Roblox,

a currency that wouldn't you know it, has itself a real-world exchange. rate. The base price you can buy is a thousand rings for 14 robux, which means that you're getting about 71 rings to the roboc. Sounds like a pretty darn good deal to me. One Roblox dollar for 71 three foot tall gold rings. Sign me up. So now all you need to do is convert robux to dollars and we've got ourselves the answer. The base rate you purchase Robux for right now is 400 Robux for five dollars. Now right there is a conversion rate of 80 robux to the dollar. So if we can get about 71 rings for one Roebuck, and 80 Robux for $1, then Sega's officially saying that one giant solid gold ring in its game is worth... Drum roll, please. 0.00017 US dollars. Huh? That can't be right, can it? I mean, we're talking about what looks to be a giant golden hula hoop. A low-end gold wedding ring is gonna run you nearly $250.

But here, we need 57 of them to make a single penny? Now, I refuse to accept this. They clearly didn't think this one through. It isn't the first time that Sega of America has done our blue boy dirty. Anyone remember that time that they told us Sonic was brown? No, I'm gonna be the one to find the real value of these rings. And in the process, I'm gonna upend your entire Roblox operation friendos. Finally, it's a Sonic theory that the internet can get behind, because I'm on your side, Sonic.

You and I are on the same team. Today, I'm gonna find out how much coin you got in your pockets that are full of rings. You get what I'm saying. My initial approach was to fight fire with fire. If these rip-off rings were coming from an in-game store, I wanted to see if there were other in-game stores, one from real Sonic games that could offer us a real answer. Of all the Sonic games out there, the amount of shops that use rings as currency is actually surprisingly small, almost as if these rings were never intended to be used as an in-game currency in the first place.

Now, besides Speed Simulator, there are only five official Sonic games with shops. Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic Riders, Sonic 06, Sonic Unleashed, and Sonic Chronicles the Dark Brotherhood. Sadly, though, the information ended up being a bit of a wash. You see, two of these shops are black markets, which means that these items are illegal to buy and sell, thereby making their prices inflate wildly and not really reliable for the comparisons that we're trying to make. And while the other three games all feature shops that are completely legal, the items that these shops are selling make it impossible to get an accurate price. Sonic 06, for instance, it sells gems,

but they only really show us the color and cut, which aren't exactly unique to any particular gemstone family. Sonic Chronicles sells clothes, and I think we all know how inconsistent clothing prices, can be once you consider brands and sizes. Finally, there's Sonic Unleashed, which does have itself the most realistic store, selling produce from various parts of the globe. But even then, those prices were inconsistent when you take into account exchange rates and inflation. So, you're telling me that it costs 40 rings for a bunch of Indonesian bananas that would typically cost 70 cents here in the real world, but 30 rings for a New York apple that don't normally cost you a dollar from a street

vendor? You see how the numbers and proportions there just don't match up? So, in true New York fashion I'm just gonna have to say, forget about it. So if I can't rely on purchasing power to value these rings, I have to go deeper, I have to roll up my sleeves, I have to do it the old fashioned way. I have to use pixel measurements, and I have to use it for science. The first test we have to do is figure out what exactly these rings are made of. Sure, we assume that they're gold just based on the yellow color, but is that actually true? It could just be gold colored, or gold plated, or some sort of gold alloy. So let's look at how the rings actually behave in game to find out what we're working with. First, we know that whatever Sonic's rings are made of, it's heavier than

water. Considering when you get hit in places like Hydrosity Zone or aquatic ruins, the scattered rings sink. That right there gives us a big old checkmark for gold, but also pretty much any other metal, so not really narrowing the field down. Secondly, look at this. When using the lightning shield in games like Sonic 3, you're able to draw the rings towards you like a magnet. That is huge, because it immediately kills the idea that the rings are made of gold. Gold isn't magnetic. This means that the rings are either made of some other metal completely, or if they are still made of gold, there has to be some other metal mixed in that is magnetic in the proper proportions. What exactly do I mean by that? Well, you might have heard gold being given labels like

24-carat, 18-carat, 12-carat, all that stuff. Well, carrot, in this case, is a measure of purity. It can be as low as one or as high as 24. The higher the carrot, the more pure and valuable the gold is. If gold is 24-carat, well, that's the highest ranking possible. That means it is 99.99% pure gold. But if it's something more like say 16 karat, that means it's not pure gold. It's instead an alloy made up of 16 parts gold It parts some other metal the highest purity a gold ring can be before it loses its magnetism is 18 Karrats However, this then presents us a bit of a problem by mixing gold with other metals you start to lose gold's iconic yellow color this then is how you achieve colors like white gold and rose gold by using silver or copper respectively as the alloy metal

Basically this is just the jewelry industry's way of selling you a less pure gold while still marketing it as gold gold. Anyway, the three most common metals to use as an alloy here that are magnetic are iron, cobalt, and nickel. But while they'll certainly give our gold ring the power of magnetism, they'll also give it a different color. Nickel will yield the much more silvery white gold, cobalt will turn the gold black, and iron will produce blue gold. And while each of those are certainly cool colors and might possibly explain some of the other rings that we see floating around in this universe, it doesn't explain our main golden rings. To get the correct yellow gold color from a gold alloy, you would have to mix the gold with equal parts, silver and copper.

Two metals, which are notably not magnetic, which means that Sonic's rings cannot be made of gold. So we need ourselves a metal that's heavier than water, that's magnetic, and also can appear golden in color. So does something like that exist? The answer is a resounding yes. Allow me to introduce you all to neodymium. Weirdly, despite being considered a rare earth metal, neodymium's about as common as other metals like nickel and cobalt, which makes it perfect for our rings, considering these things

are just lying around Sonic's world by the hundreds. And while neodymium is usually a silvery metal when it's in the ground, as it touches the air, it oxidizes, which turns it into a wonderful shade of yellowish gold. But that's not all. It can also turn into a whole bunch of other colors, like blue, purple, and pink, which would explain why there are all these other various colors of rings

sprinkled across the Sonic games. But most importantly, neodymium is magnetic, and I mean, extremely magnetic, so much so that one of its most common uses is, well, magnets. A single gram of neodymium can lift an entire kilogram of of steel. It is some powerful stuff, and the power of neodymium doesn't stop there. Neodymium magnets are very commonly used inside rechargeable batteries for companies like Tesla and their electric vehicles. Batteries equal energy, and while we've been talking about Sonic's rings as a form of currency,

throughout the franchise, these rings are also said to contain some ring energy. They're a power source that helps Sonic maintain a supersonic transformation, something that wouldn't really apply to a gold ring, but could very easily apply to a neodymium ring. So really, Sonic's gold rings are better described as his neodymium rings. And now that we know what they're made of, we can figure out how much a ring would be worth. All we need to figure out is the weight of these rings for our final value.

And just like most things in math, there's an equation for that. Mass equals density multiplied by volume. Neodymium has the density of 7 grams per cubic centimeter. So, all we need to do is figure out their volume, and bam, we have ourselves our final number. The volume of a ring, or in geometrical terms, a torus, is a little more challenging than something like a sphere. With a sphere, all you need is a radius,

and from there you can figure out pretty much everything else. But with the ring, you actually need two measurements. The minor radius, which is the radius of the solid tube of gold, and the major radius, the radius from the center of the circle to the center of the tube. The easiest way to get both of these radii is with pixel measurements. Comparing the size of the ring to something else in the world around it that we know the measurement of, which in this case is Sonic himself. Canonically, Sonic is 100 centimeters tall.

And if we take this shot from Sonic Unleashed, one of the games where he uses his rings as currency, this means that the major radius is 24.4 centimeters or 9.6 inches, and the minor radius is 4.76 centimeters or about 1.9 inches. From there, we just plug those numbers into this handy-dandy formula for the volume of Taurus, pi minor radius squared multiplied by 2 pi major radius. We get that these rings have a volume of 11,000 cubic centimeters or 66 cubic inches. Multiply that by the density of neodymium,

and we get ourselves a total mass of 76 kilograms or just about 170 pounds. You heard that right. Each individual giant Sonic ring here is weighing over 100, pounds. Now, if these things were made of gold like everyone's been assuming, gold's price per pound is currently $2250,250, meaning that a single large gold ring like this would be worth $4,717,000. Each ring. Sonic would be able to collect one of these babies and just retire. Screw you, Eggman, I'm going to go home and eat chili dogs with tails. Neodymium, though, well, let's just say it's a lot more affordable as a metal. It used to be worth around $60 a kilogram because of how common it is, but with the increased demand for electric vehicles over the last seven, years, neodymium prices have surged. Right now it's about double what it was? $127 a kilogram, or about $270 a pound. Expensive, but yeah, still quite a bit cheaper than gold. Which means that our $5 million giant gold ring is actually more like a $9,600 neodymium ring. Don't me wrong, still plenty of money. And if he gets a hundred of these bad boys, he's not just getting an extra life,

he's basically getting his own life back as he retires. Except there is another issue here. The giant rings, they don't seem to be accurate to the size that these rings really are. You see in most recent Sonic media, including both the games and new movies, Sonic's rings shrink in size to the proportions of a wedding ring when he picks him up. Probably help him to explain how he's able to hold so many in his, um, in his pockets, I guess. Anyway, that would help explain how he's able to carry around multiple of these 200-pound behemoth rings without getting slowed down. The best shot that I could find to get a proper measurement of these from the games is this shot,

from the trailer of Sonic Unleashed, a game where he specifically uses the rings as currency. Now, I'm not going to bore you with the details the second time, so after some careful pixel measurements and comparisons we can determine that this smaller ring has a volume of 12.5 cubic centimeters or 0.76 cubic inches giving us a weight of 0.09 kilograms much more in the realm of plausibility. Taking all the numbers that would make this neodymium ring worth drum roll please. 11 bucks. To put them perspective in Sonic's newest game Sonic Frontiers, your maximum ring capacity is 400 rings, which means Sonic is only carrying around 4,400 bucks. It's not a bad amount of cash by any means, but it still feels kind of like a rough deal when you think that you're getting a gold ring the size of your fist.

And speaking of rough deals, remember how I said that in some of the Sonic games, Sonic is paying somewhere like 30 rings for a single apple? Well, that right there would make the Apple worth over $300. The biggest problem in the Sonic universe isn't Robotnik. Clearly, it is rampant price inflation. Though, then again, I guess it kind of checks out when your currency is floating in the air by the thousands. So, there you have it, friends.

The true value of Sonic's neodymium rings is $11. Not as valuable as we might have thought from a gold ring, but hey, they're 65,000 times more valuable than what Sega of America claimed in Sonic Speed Simulator, proving developers of classic 90s IP wrong, that is always a win in my book. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.