Sonic the Hedgehog will be 34 years old this year, and just in case you wanted to brush up on the complex lore of the series, Sega has released a complete official timeline, stretching from "tens of thousands of years ago" up to 200 years in the future.
Right now, this timeline only appears to be visible on the Japanese Sonic Channel site, so it has to be machine-translated to view it in English, but it's seriously detailed. For each chunk of lore, the most relevant games are listed, so anyone who wants to attempt a chronological play order can do so, although some games appear multiple times at wildly different points in the timeline because of how they tie into various events, so don't expect this to work entirely smoothly.
While not every game has been included here, there's one very surprising inclusion – the party game Sonic Shuffle. It might look like a Mario Party-like board game spin-off (and, uh, it is), but Sonic still helps save a mysterious dream world called Maginaryworld, so into the timeline it goes. "WHAT DO YOU MEAN SONIC SHUFFLE IS CANON?" one baffled fan on Reddit questions.
Otherwise, lore heads have pointed out that the two PSP Sonic Rivals games are absent, which, as one fan summarizes, "are pretty important as they reintroduce Silver, retcon Eggman Nega's origins and officially bring back Metal Sonic," not to mention the fact that there's a reference to Rivals 2 in last year's Sonic x Shadow Generations (in Gerald Robotnik's journal). There might be a simple explanation for this, though, as the two Rivals games were never released in Japan, and this is a Japanese website, so Sega might not want to make references to games its intended audience has most likely never played.
Needless to say, the timeline doesn't provide absolutely perfect answers for how every game fits into the full story, but it's still really cool that we have an official resource to refer to for a lot of the series. Clearly though, some of us need to catch up with that all-important Sonic Shuffle lore.
While you're here, be sure to check out our roundup of the 25 best Sonic games of all time.
