How old is Sonic the Hedgehog?

There is a such thing as a “stock character” in all forms of media and fiction. They serve as almost pre-established, self-explanatory archetypes that you can conceivably describe a character as “oh, he’s like Han Solo,” and someone knows what that means. The character is suave, rugged and roguish. There are countless examples of archetypal character molds throughout storytelling, and one of my very favorite is the caveman. A generic club wielding primitive man who either exists in his own fictional interpretation of the Stone Age, where he battles dinosaurs, eats comically large chunks of meat and gets into all sorts of prehistoric high jinks, or we get the caveman who was frozen in a block of ice for millennia and upon thawing, he finds himself in whatever era he was written to be in, like some sort of Captain America clad in a sabre-tooth tiger pelt and brandishing a mammoth bone as a weapon.

 

The caveman has been featured across fiction for many decades; whether it’s TV shows like Captain Caveman, the infamous Geico-created Cavemen, The Flintstones, Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal, or novels like The Clan of the Cave Bear and even into major motion pictures such as The Croods, 10,000 B.C., Encino Man and countless other prehistoric tales. Video games are no different. We had a huge stretch of games spanning the first few generations of consoles that featured spectacular Stone Age settings.

 

TOMY Caveman, 1983 — image from obscurevideogames.tumblr.com

Forty years ago, still in the embryonic phase of the video game industry, TOMY, the famed Japanese toy company, released Caveman. Compared to the video games of today, this may as well be a product of the actual Stone Age. It appears to function much like a calculator of the time, displaying simplistic, yet charming, images of a tiny caveman who is having to battle a mighty dinosaur so that he can procure her eggs; truly a tale as old as time itself. There are some incredible “gameplay” videos of this device on YouTube that I highly recommend checking out, if you enjoy gaming history and seeing how far we’ve come as an industry.

 

Not long after this, we started seeing proper video games, more akin to how we recognize them today, and they were games of various genres and gameplay styles. Titles like the garishly colored platformer Frak! (which sounds like either a prehistoric expletive or a slur), Adventures of Dino Riki, an overhead shooter in the vein of 1943, or Caveman Ugh-lympics, a goofy and quite ugly game about the Olympics during the Stone Age, with athletic competitions like running from a sabre-tooth tiger, throwing your friend as far as possible or clubbing someone to death. Let’s bring back these sports to the next Olympics. I haven’t watched since the Beijing Olympics in 2008, but if you told me “friend-hurling” was going to be at the next one, I’m there.

 

Bonk’s Adventure, TurboGrafx-16–1989

By 1989, we’ve passed the awkward primitive preamble, and have entered into the period of bonafide classics, like Bonk’s Adventure. This adorable game, with its heaping helping of Japanese flavor, served as a notable entry on the peculiar TurboGrafx-16 console. Bonk even became something of a mascot on that console. Just a couple of years later, in 1991, the caveman was everywhere. The SNES was absolutely jam-packed with these guys. Chuck Rock (which spawned multiple sequels), Big Nose the Caveman (which also had a sequel) and perhaps the most prominent of this entire bizarre genre, Joe & Mac hit the scene all in the same year. My first experience with the caveman-themed video game was actually through Joe & Mac. I remember my older brother bringing the game home one day and I was immediately smitten with the charming, goofy aesthetic, though the gameplay was somewhat unremarkable, though Joe & Mac 2: Lost in the Tropics was a nice upgrade, featuring some RPG-lite mechanics, which added some depth to the game.

 

 I can imagine you reading this and thinking that I haven’t listed that many caveman games. For one thing, I haven’t listed every single Stone Age-set game here, for brevity’s sake. But, here’s where it gets interesting. Most of these games were ported to multiple consoles and some of the versions were almost their own separate game entirely. For instance, Joe & Mac had multiple sequels, some on Sega Genesis or the Nintendo Game Boy, as well as an arcade exclusive sequel. The Bonk series released 7 games between 1989 and 1994 across Game Boy, NES, TurboGrafx-16 and SNES. There are are entire series that I haven’t mentioned yet, like: Prehistorik, The Humans, Wonder Boy, Adventure Island, Congo’s Caper and many, many more. I cannot stress this point enough, we were positively drowning in caveman games for several years; until suddenly we weren’t.

 

Tail of the Sun, PlayStation — 1996

 It seems that our little Stone Age ended with the onset of the PlayStation/Sega Saturn/Nintendo 64 console generation. There’s one notable game that I can think of called Tail of the Sun, that was almost like a proto-Minecraft. You played as a caveman who hunted animals and built shelter, in an effort to collect mammoth tusks and build a tower high enough to reach the Sun. This was really one of the only prehistoric set games after the deluge of the SNES generation. The genre is mostly back on ice in the modern era.

 

New Joe & Mac Caveman Ninja, PC, Switch, PS5/PS4, Xbox Series X|S/XBO — 2022

 Recently, the block of ice bearing our frozen caveman genre has begun to trickle just the slightest drip of modern releases. On the AAA front, we got the interesting experiment Far Cry Primal, a rare step away from the predictability of the Far Cry series. Most of the newer prehistoric themed games have been remakes of the older classics. In 2016, we received Wonder Boy Returns, which itself got remastered in 2019, as Wonder Boy Returns Remix. And the iconic Joe & Mac series was given the remake treatment with a delightful looking new entry in 2022, though I heard it was not of the highest caliber.

 

Wonder Boy Returns

 

While it feels like the caveman era has largely come and gone, I think it’s safe to say that you have enough retro games from that genre to last you quite a long time. Perhaps long enough for another remake of a classic to hit the scene. It feels like Bonk is overdue for a come back. Or maybe Prehistorik will see a second life on modern platforms. This was an interesting era in video game history that not many people talk about, but given the prolific run of releases, I thought it was worth doing a little retrospective. Hopefully we will see a second coming of the video game Stone Age. For now, our club-wielding, pelt-wearing lunkhead old friend is still frozen in time.