Game Theory: Sonic's Rings Are A SCAM!? (Sonic The Hedgehog)

Rings one of the most iconic collectibles in all of gaming they protect Sonic from harm they give him extra lives and most impressively of all they fuel the Super Sonic State giving him insane amounts of power and an awesome soundtrack they also The Unofficial sound effect of gas station cash registers for some reason because of all of these reasons Sonic's rings are invaluable or are they this is America after all everything's got itself a price everything is worth something and considering that these rings have been used as a currency in past games it means that these rings are no exception the only question I'm left with though is Sonic a wealthy Hedgehog or is he a broke boy hello Internet welcome to Game Theory the show that liked Theory so much it put a ring on it speaking of rings the Sonic series is full of them blue Rings dark Rings Dash Rings red star Rings you name them they're there but that's not what you're thinking of when I say Sonic's Rings is it no you're thinking about these guys the gold rings that are scattered throughout every stage of every game for years I've wondered how much these things would possibly be worth I mean they're just giant gold rings floating in the sky after all half the size of most of the characters in the franchise you'd think that they'd be worth a pretty penny but before I could even think about writing this episode Sega did something I never anticipated they gave us an answer and they did it in probably the weirdest way they could of through a Roblox game Sonic Speed simulator is an officially licensed game by Sega of America and in it you can collect rings that can be used to buy items although instead of a shop like past games this one actually uses vending machines where you essentially gamble for random Cosmetics I would make a comment about how all of this is being targeted at children but then again Sonic ain't exactly new to the world of casinos anyway in the game Sega offers you the chance to buy rings using roox the in-game currency of Roblox a currency that wouldn't you know it has it s a real world exchange rate the base price you can buy is 1,000 rings for 14 roox which means that you're getting about 71 rings to the Roo sounds like a pretty darn good deal to me one Roblox dollar for 71 3ft tall gold rings sign me up so now all we need to do is convert Roo to Dollars and we've got ourselves the answer the base rate you purchase Roo for right now is 400 robu for $5 that right there is a conversion rate of 80 Robux to the dollar so if we can get about 71 rings for one robu and 80 robu for $1 then sega's officially saying that one giant solid gold ring in its game is worth drum roll please .17 us huh that that that can't be right can it I mean we're talking about what looks to be a giant golden hula hoop a low-end gold wedding ring is going to run you nearly $250 but here we' need 57 of them to make a single penny now I ref refused to accept this they clearly didn't think this went through it isn't the first time that Sega of America has done our Blue Boy dirty anyone remember that time that they told us Sonic was Brown No I'm going to be the one to find the real value of these rings and in the process I'm going to upend your entire Roblox operation friendos finally it's a Sonic theory that the internet can get behind because I'm on your side Sonic you and I are on the same team today I'm going to find out how much coin you got in your pockets that are full of rings you get what I'm saying my initial approach was to Fight Fire with Fire if these ripoff Rings were coming from an in-game store I wanted to see if there were other in-game stores one from real Sonic games that could offer us a real answer of all the Sonic games out there the amount of shops that use rings as currency is actually surprisingly small almost as if these Rings were never intended to be used as an in-game currency in the first place now besides speed simulator there are only five official Sonic games with shops Sonic Adventure 2 Sonic Riders Sonic 06 Sonic Unleashed and Sonic Chronicles the Dark Brotherhood sadly though the information ended up being a bit of a wash you see two of these shops are black markets which means that these items are illegal to buy and sell thereby making their prices inflate wildly and not really reliable for the comparisons that we're trying to make and while the other three games all feature shops that are completely legal the items that these shops are selling make it impossible to get an accurate price Sonic 06 for instance it sells gems but they only really show us the color and cut which aren't exactly unique to any particular gemstone family Sonic Chronicles sells clothes and I think we all know how in consistent clothing prices can be once you consider Brands and sizes finally there's Sonic Unleashed which does have itself the most realistic store selling produce from various parts of the globe but even then those prices were inconsistent when you take into account exchange rates and inflation so you're telling me that it costs 40 rings for a bunch of Indonesian bananas that would typically cost 7 cents here in the real world but 30 rings for a New York Apple that'll normally cost you a dollar from a street vendor you see how the numbers and proportions there just don't match up so in true New York Fashion I'm just going to have to say forget about it so if I can't rely on purchasing power to Value these rings I have to go deeper I have to roll up my sleeves I have to do it the oldfashioned way I have to use pixel measurements and I have to use it for science speaking of science I actually need your help with another experiment I'm doing this is also going to help with an upcoming FNAF episode that's right you can be a part of a FNAF episode some of you might remember a few years ago when I asked you guys to take the Myers Briggs personality test that way I was a to break down what personality types you were well I've got some more theories on the horizon a FNAF theory in particular that needs some of that data I also have a bunch of ideas for Tik Tok Instagram and Twitter that are in the works that are going to need that same information you can actually follow us at Team theorist on Twitter and Instagram and @game theorist official on Tik Tok if you want to see those theories when they drop yep we have official social channels now finally after years and years it's actually really cool there's a lot of fun stuff on them anyway the tldr is that this community's grown a lot over the last cou couple years so to get the most accurate results possible I've put a link to a survey down in the description below with all the questions that I need to help me solve this upcoming FNAF Theory as well as a couple of these social videos that are going to be rolling out over the next couple weeks if you could just do me a favor and fill out that questionnaire while I finish this episode that would be super duper helpful for those upcoming theories and while you're doing that I'm going to go back to figuring out what exactly the value of a Sonic ring is the first test we have to do is figure out what exactly these rings are made of sure we assume that they're gold just based on the yellow color but is that actually true they could just be gold colored or goldplated or some sort of gold alloy so let's look at how the Rings actually behave in game to find out what we're working with first we know that whatever Sonic's rings are made of it's heavier than water considering when you get hit in places like hydrocity zone or aquatic ruins the scattered ring sink that right there gives us a big old check mark for gold but also pretty much any other metal so not really narrowing the field down secondly look at this when using the lightning shield in games like Sonic 3 you're able to draw the Rings towards you like like a magnet that is huge cuz it immediately kills the idea that the Rings are made of gold gold isn't magnetic this means that the Rings are either made of some other metal completely or if they are still made of gold there has to be some other metal mixed in that is magnetic in the proper proportions what exactly do I mean by that well you might have heard gold being given labels like 24 Karat 18 karat 12 karat all that stuff well carrot in this case is a measure of Purity it can be as low as 1 or as high as 24 the higher the carrot the more pure and valuable the gold is if gold is 24 Karat well that's the highest ranking possible that means it is 99.99% pure gold but if it's something more like say 16 karat that means it's not pure gold it's instead an alloy made up of 16 Parts gold eight parts some other metal the highest purity of gold ring can be before it loses its magnetism is 18 Kat however this then presents us a bit of a problem by mixing gold with other metals you start to lose Gold's iconic yellow color this then is how you achieve colors like white gold and rose gold by using silver or copper respectively as the alloy metal basically this is just the jewelry industry's way of selling you a less pure gold while still marketing it as gold gold probably worth dedicating an episode of style Theory to this at some point anyway the three most common metals to use as an alloy here that are magnetic are iron Cobalt and nickel but while they'll certainly give our gold ring the power of magnetism they'll also give it a different color nickel will yield the much more silvery white gold Cobalt will turn the gold black and iron will produce blue gold and while each of those are certainly cool colors and might possibly explain some of the other rings that we see floating around in this universe it doesn't explain our main golden rings to get the correct yellow gold color from a gold alloy you would have to mix the gold with equal parts silver and copper two metals which are notably not magnetic which means that Sonic's Rings cannot be made of gold so we need ourselves a metal that's heavier than water that's magnetic and also can appear golden in color so does something like that exist the answer is a resounding yes allow me to introduce you all to neodymium weirdly despite being considered a rare earth metal neodymium is about as common as other metals like nickel and Cobalt which makes it perfect for our Rings considering these things are just lying around Sonic's World by the hundreds and while neodymium is usually a silvery metal when it's in the ground as it touches the air it oxidizes which turns it into a wonderful shade of yellowish gold but that's not all it can also turn into a whole bunch of other colors like blue purple and pink which would explain why there are all these other various colors of rings sprinkled across the Sonic games but most importantly neodymium is magnetic and I mean extremely magnetic so much so that one of it most common uses is well magnets a single gram of neodymium can lift an entire kilogram of Steel it is some powerful stuff and the power of neodymium doesn't stop there neodymium magnets are very commonly used inside rechargeable batteries for companies like Tesla and their electric vehicles batteries equal energy and while we've been talking about Sonic's rings as a form of currency throughout the franchise these rings are also said to contain some ring energy they're a power source that helps Sonic maintain a suponic transformation something that wouldn't really apply to a gold ring but could very easily apply to a neodymium ring so really Sonic's gold rings are better described as his neodymium rings and now that we know what they're made of we can figure out how much a ring would be worth all we need to figure out is the weight of these rings for our final value and just like most things in math there's an equation for that mass equals density multiplied by volume neodymium has a density of 7 G per cubic cenm so all we need to do is figure out their volume and Bam we have ourselves our final number the volume of a ring or in geometrical terms a Taurus is a little more challenging than something like a sphere with a sphere all you need is is a radius and from there you can figure out pretty much everything else but with a ring you actually need two measurements the minor radius which is the radius of the solid tube of gold and the major radius the radius from the center of the circle to the center of the tube the easiest way to get both of these radi is with pixel measurements comparing the sides of the Ring to something else in the world around it that we know the measurement of which in this case is Sonic himself canonically Sonic is 100 cm tall and if we take this shot from Sonic Unleashed one of the games where he uses his rings as currency this means that the major radius is 24.4 CM or 9.6 in and the minor radius is 4.76 CM or about 1.9 in from there we just plug those numbers into this handy dandy formula for the volume of a Taurus Pi minor radius squar multiplied by 2 pi major radius we get that these rings have a volume of 11,000 cubic cm or 666 cubic in multiply that by the density of neodymium and we get ourselves a total mass of 76 kg or just about 170 lb you heard that right each individual giant Sonic ring here is weighing over 100 lb now if these things were made of gold like everyone's been assuming gold's price per pound is currently $222,200 meaning that a single large gold ring like this would be worth $4 m717 th000 each ring Sonic would be able to collect one of these babies and just retire screw you Eggman I'm going to go home and eat chil dogs with Tails neodymium though well let's just say it's a lot more affordable as a metal it used to be worth around $60 a kg because of how common it is but with the increased demand for electric vehicles over the last several years neodymium prices have surged right now it's about double what it was $127 a kg or about 270 bucks a pound expensive but yeah still quite a bit cheaper than gold which means that our $5 million giant gold ring is actually more like a $9,600 neodymium ring don't get me wrong still plenty of money and if he gets a 100 of these bad boys he's not just getting an extra life he's basically getting his own life back as he retires except there is another issue here the giant rings they don't seem to be accurate to the size that the Rings really are you see in most recent Sonic media including both the games and new movies Sonic's Rings shrink in size to the proportions of a wedding ring when he picks him up probably helping to explain how he's able to hold so many in his um in his pockets I guess anyway that would help explain how he's able to carry around multiple of these 200 lb Behemoth rings without getting slowed down the best shot that I could find to get a proper measurement of these from the games is this shot from the trailer of Sonic Unleashed a game where he specifically uses the Rings as currency now I'm not going to bore you with the details a second time so after some care care F pixel measurements and comparisons we can determine that this smaller ring has a volume of 12.5 cubic cm or 76 cubic in giving us a weight of 9 kg much more in the realm of plausibility taking all the numbers that would make this neodymium ring worth drum roll please 11 bucks to put that in perspective in Sonic's newest game Sonic Frontiers your maximum ring capacity is 400 Rings which means Sonic is only carrying around 4,400 bucks it's not a bad amount of cash by any means but still feels kind of like a rough deal when you think that getting a gold ring the size of your fist and speaking of rough deals remember how I said that in some of the Sonic games Sonic is paying somewhere like 30 rings for a single Apple well that right there would make the Apple worth over $300 the biggest problem in the Sonic Universe isn't Robotnik clearly it is rampant price inflation so then again I guess it kind of checks out when your currency is floating in the air by the thousands so there you have it friends the true value of Sonic's neodymium Rings is 11 bucks not as valuable as we might have thought from a gold ring but hey they're 65,000 times more valuable than what Sega of America claimed in Sonic Speed simulator proving developers of classic '90s IP wrong that is always a win in my book but hey that's just a theory a game theory thanks for watching and if you want more examples of mathematically analyzing the weirdness of the Sonic franchise click the video on the left where we figure out how many chili dogs Sonic would have to eat to maintain his crazy amount of running or if you want to see me fall deeper down the Sonic Rabbit Hole why not check out this GT live where Ash and I go crazy trying to figure out who killed Sonic the Hedgehog that video is over on the right as always my friends don't forget to subscribe and I will see you all next week

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 1,724,972

Keywords: sonic, sonic rings, sonic the hedgehog, sega, sonic lore, sonic game, sonic frontiers, sonic rings are not gold, sonic ring, sonics rings, gold rings, new sonic game, tails, knuckles, hedgehog, sonic world, sonic Roblox, sonic Roblox game, Roblox sonic, official sonic Roblox game, Roblox game, Roblox, best sonic game, sonic theory, game theorists, matpat, game theory, gt, gt sonic, game theory sonic, matpat sonic

Id: Tqqsb0X3yHA

Length: 14min 35sec (875 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 07 2023