2007's worst kept gaming secrets

Sonic The Hedgehog is confirmed to be in Super Smash Bros. Brawl

This rumour seems to have been with us longer than our own teeth. With Sega now out of the hardware race (unless that recent Dreamcast 2 story ends up on this list next year), the blue ballistic has for quite some time has been floundering with no stable home to call his own. His 3D games have felt increasingly like getting broken glass in your eye and trying to remove it with a power drill, while evenhis 2D games haven’t been a patch on his Mega Drive heyday. Watching Sonic in recent years has been like seeing an old friend fall in with a bad crowd and swap his university application for a dirty needle full of smack. Clearly Sonic needed help, and understandably fans looked towards Nintendo.

The other veteran of the original console war, Ninty came out of it much better than Sega did, and with their rivalry no longer an issue, fanboy dreams of an alliance gained a certain poetic quality. With its ever-expanding roster already integrating Konami’s Solid Snake, Smash Bros seemed the obvious route in for Sonic - and indeed it was - and by the time his inclusion was announced it had become so accepted that it was going to happen that it would have been a far bigger deal had he not appeared.