About

Google "[Your Name] The Hedgehog", Post Result is an online forum game inviting people to use the Google search engine for images by typing their first name followed by "the hedgehog" in reference to the famous Sonic The Hedgehog franchise, and then link the result to the thread. The main purpose of this game is to highlight the overwhelming volume of original character artworks produced by fans of the franchise, especially on the online artist community deviantART, which are deemed by many as cringeworthy.

Origin

On September 11th, 2010, IGN member Kirby-Star started a thread titled "Google (Your Name) The Hedgehog"^[1]. Most of the replies involved either a link to or an actual image of a fan-made character from the Sonic series sporting the user's first name. The thread led to 17 posts prior to being archived and is the earliest documented instance of the game.

Precursor:

“Smash Face On Keyboard, Post Results!” is a type of forum gaming activity that involves striking one’s head against the keyboard and posting the result in a serial thread. Since its introduction via 4chan in early 2009, the phenomenon has spread to hundreds of websites and forums.

Spread

On November 14th, 2010, a similar game thread was posted to the Sega forums^[2] and led to four pages of replies, as of August 2015. On November 29th, the game found itself in the VG Box Art forums^[3], extending six pages. This time, however, the original poster pointed to deviantART as the primary source of research for finding Sonic The Hedgehog fan-made characters. These kinds of threads began to pop up quite a lot on various famous forums, including Neogaf's ^[4] and BodyBuilding.com's ^[5]. The game's increasing popularity reached BuzzFeed when BuzzFeed Staff member Cates Holderness posted an article titled Find Your "Sonic The Hedgehog" Doppelgänger^[6] on August 30th 2013.

Various Examples

To browse more examples of related fan illustrations, head over to the Sonic Original Characters gallery.

Google "[Your Name] The Pony", Post Result

A variation of the game emerged following the online popularity of the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic tv show. Because it led to a major increase in fan-made pony characters, which may have been made easier due to specific pony creator tools, game threads using the "[Your name] + the pony" formula started appearing as early as 2011. Such examples can be seen on The Escapist forums^[7], LukerFAQs^[8], 4chan ^[9] and even Reddit ^[10].

External References