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 amount of fan-made artworks (also known as OC) mostly coming from art site Deviant Art and based on the Sonic universe, that are deemed 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.
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 Deviant Art as a 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.
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
[1]IGN forums – Google (Your Name) The Hedgehog
[2]Sega forums – Your name Here the Hedgehog/Fox/Echinda/ect.
[3]VG Box Art forums – [Your Name] the Hedeghog
[4]NeoGAF forums – Search “[your name] the hedgehog” on Deviantart and see what happens.
[5]BodyBuilding.com forums – For lulz, google image search [your name] the hedgehog
[6]BuzzFeed – Find Your “Sonic The Hedgehog” Doppelgänger
[7]The Escapist forums – Google Your name + The Pony = pic?
[8]LurkerFAQs – Google image search “(your name) the pony” post the first pic
[9]Archive 4plebs – /pol/ thread
[10]Reddit –