Interview: Sonic Team head talks CrossRoads, competing with Mario Kart World and leak culture

The last time I spoke to Sonic Team head Takashi Iizuka was at Gamescom, when the studio was preparing to release Sonic X Shadow Generations.

In that last conversation, Iizuka discussed how looking back at Sonic’s past – something Sonic X Shadow Generations does in more ways than one – was a good way to ensure success in the future.

From what I played of Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds at Summer Game Fest this weekend – there’s a full write-up to come later – it feels like the same has happened again, with Sega‘s arcade racing team looking back to previous entries in the Sonic Racing series to reintroduce the elements players loved most.

Many karting fans (myself included) believe that, of all the games that in the karting genre that don’t have any plumbers in them, 2012’s Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed is the top of the list, due to its countless crossovers spanning the entire Sega universe and beyond, and its brilliant vehicle transformation mechanic.

2019’s Team Sonic Racing removed all these, delivering a safe roster of 15 strictly Sonic-only characters, and while it was still entertaining enough on the track the party atmosphere felt somewhat muted compared to the previous Sonic & Sega All-Stars ensemble racing games.

That’s all changed for CrossWorlds. Not only are the transforming vehicles returning, but Sega also announced during the main Summer Game Fest showcase that crossovers would be coming back too, with characters from both Sega’s own IP (Hatsune Miku, Joker from Persona 5, Ichiban Kasuga from Like a Dragon) and third-party IP (Minecraft) set to feature.

Following this announcement, I sat down with Iizuka again to discuss the game’s apparent return to what worked before, as well as a range of other Sonic-related topics.

Obviously the big announcement this weekend was the crossover content. How much trickier does it make developing a game of this nature when you’re dealing with multiple IP owners, all of whom presumably have their own guidelines and rules for each character?

When we’re developing the game, we’re really thinking of it as a Sonic racing game. And in order to make it that, we really need to make sure the Sonic characters are in there, the game systems are in there, the travel ring that we put in there, it all works within like the constructs and ideas of what a Sonic racing game should be.

And then, once we’ve kind of locked down what that game is with all the systems in place, with all the characters in place, then we have to go to the IP holders, the people who are in charge of the various characters that we want to put in the game and we have to explain: “We’ve made a Sonic racing game, here’s how it works, here’s the rules of the world, can we collaborate? Can we work with you to put your character into our game within the construct of it being a Sonic racing game?”

So we have to start with those conversations in order to get them on board to even collaborate with them.

So presumably then most, if not all of the collaborations were instigated by Sonic Team or Sega reaching out to all the IP owners rather than those companies approaching you and looking for a way to collaborate with Sonic?

Yes, a lot of the collaborations we needed to secure before we could even announce the title, so we had to be the ones to proactively go out there and promote the title that we were making, and get people to get on board really early to give us the time in order to make it for announcement.

I’ve really enjoyed the Sonic racing games in the past and was a particular fan of the crossovers. Not just the presence of other Sega characters, but the likes of Banjo & Kazooie in Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing, and Wreck-it Ralph in Sonic & Sega All-Stars Transformed.

I also enjoyed Team Sonic Racing, but that was strictly limited to characters from the Sonic universe. Was there a lot of feedback from the fans saying they missed the Sega and third-party IP crossovers, and was that the driving force behind bringing them back and seemingly making them the main focus this time?

When we released Team Sonic Racing we did hear from a lot of the All-Star Racing fans who were like: “Hey, what happened to all the collabs? Why aren’t there collabs in this game? We really wanted that.” So we kind of took that to heart.

When we thought about making the Sonic Racing CrossWorlds game, part of the whole idea was we wanted to take the best parts – the things people like from all of our games from the Sonic Racing series – get those features in, get the things that people want in there and design a game around that.

So we had things like in Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, the racing through the air, the land and sea, those were elements that we wanted to take – because people liked them so much – and put them into Sonic Racing Crossworlds, just like people really, really wanted those other IP outside of Sonic to be in the game.

We’re listening to what people wanted, and the whole concept of this game is to add in all those good elements from all the Sonic Racing games.

“When we released Team Sonic Racing we did hear from a lot of the All-Star Racing fans who were like: ‘Hey, what happened to all the collabs? Why aren’t there collabs in this game? We really wanted that.’ So we kind of took that to heart.”

I was nervous about mentioning Mario Kart until Izuka-san mentioned Mario Kart onstage at Summer Game Fest.

[laughs] No no, I didn’t mention it!

In terms of that moment, although you didn’t mention it by name it was still a fun reminder of the old Sega vs Nintendo rivalry where Sega had playful jabs at what was then its opposition.

I know everyone’s friends now – which is why Sega had three launch games on Switch 2 – but I wonder if you miss those days when there was a rivalry there, and whether that was an attempt to rekindle it.

So again, this isn’t a Sega vs Nintendo kind of thing going on at all, but when people talk about kart racing, Mario Kart World just came out, Mario Kart has been the king of kart racing for the longest time. I think everyone knows that and appreciates that.

But when we are developing our games, what we want to do is think – what kind of content can we make? What can we offer players that’s going to be different, and something fun and appealing that can be competitive as far as a fun experience?

And that’s really what we take to heart, and one of the things that we can do is we can go out there and make a multi-platform SKU and deliver it to everyone on every platform.

With that in mind, when it was first revealed that Mario Kart World was open world, I wonder if the team thought “well that’s good”, because that kind of separates the games a bit. They almost complement each other now and no longer feel like direct competitors, because although they’re both kart racing games they seem to have gone off in different routes.

Yeah, with Mario Kart World they did the whole open world racing, that’s their new way of playing a Mario Kart game, and we really think it’s a great, interesting direction for them to go in.

We even started at a different point. Our development team, the people who developed Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, is our Sega arcade racing team.

They have tons of experience making racing games, and the whole focus about what we wanted to do from the very beginning was about taking that racing game and improving it and modernizing it and putting all these new, fun, crazy ideas into what a racing game could be, and developing that as our product.

So even from the conceptual level, I think both of the titles are going in different directions and offering different experiences to people, so the design itself is fundamentally different.

“Even from the conceptual level, I think both of the titles are going in different directions and offering different experiences to people, so the design itself is fundamentally different.”

I know there are live service elements to CrossWorlds – presumably the aim is to continue adding more content, and also more crossovers over time? With a concept like this I’ve got to imagine that there’s a lot of potential in the future, because the possibilities are essentially endless in terms of which characters can be added.

One of the ideas, and one of the design challenges for us, is making a game that’s going to provide a lot of fun content for a really long time. And in order to do that we really need to make sure that even after launch we’re giving people more fun things to do so they keep coming back and they’re able to get more out of the game and play for a longer time.

So the characters that you saw yesterday – Kasuga, Hatsune Miku, Joker – these are all characters that we’re going to give people. So when you buy the game, even after the game has launched, we’re going to be releasing these new characters, for free, for people to get back in, get a new character and go and have fun, continuing to play the game with different characters.

Also, what we presented yesterday was the Minecraft collaboration. That’s going to be tied into our Season Pass, and the Season Pass will be a paid experience, and when you buy the Season Pass you’re buying one year of support.

We’ll be adding in more content with these big collaborations with third-parties, really making sure there’s more content delivered, more courses to race in, and providing that extra fun thing for those who are buying into the Season Pass.

While adding other Sega characters to the game is obviously designed to mainly appeal to players familiar with those characters, is the hope from Sega also that it might introduce them to a new audience and build the player base of their respective games?

Sega sells a lot of games to people, and we have a lot of characters inside all these different games from different genres that are out there. And what we’ve realised is that a lot of people maybe like the characters or know the characters but they don’t necessarily like playing the game genre that they come from.

So not only do we get to put out the variety of characters that fall under the titles Sega releases, we also get to have people experience those characters in a different genre of game that they come from.

You know, Hatsune Miku is usually centred in a rhythm music style game, and maybe some people really like the character but they want to play with Hatsune Miku outside of that game genre.

We’re allowing people to do that by bringing all these characters from lots of different game genres and styles and putting them in this racing game format, so if you like racing games and you love all these different characters, you get to still experience those characters inside of the racing game format that you also enjoy.

It was also announced that the game is coming to Switch 2 at some point after release. When you look at some of Sega’s other more graphically intensive games like Sonic Frontiers on Switch, although they do a good job of pushing the hardware to its limits it’s clear that compromises had to be made there.

I’ve been playing the Switch 2 version of Sonic X Shadow Generations and it runs very smoothly, so although Sega presumably isn’t planning to move entirely away from Switch for now, how has it been working on Switch 2 with the extra power it provides?

The original Switch is a great machine. A lot of people play portably and [have had] experiences that were really solid. When we talk about Switch 2, because the performance of the hardware has been improved, a lot of the decisions we had to make when getting a high-performance game onto a Switch 1, you don’t have to make as many concessions [on Switch 2].

You’ll get improved frame rate and improved resolution, so a lot of those experiences are going to better just because the performance of the hardware is so much improved. So we’re really looking forward to bringing more games out on Switch 2.

For Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, on September 25 we’re releasing the game, but unfortunately it will only be on Switch 1 on the 25th. But the team is hard at work at making sure we’re getting the game onto Switch 2 as soon as possible, so we really hope a little bit after September 25 you’ll see that Switch 2 version coming to market, and we hope everyone gets to purchase it, play it and enjoy it.

So if people buy the Switch version then upgrade to Switch 2, will progression carry over?

We’re currently thinking about that Switch to Switch 2 kind of progression, yes.

Going back to the idea of introducing characters to newcomers, if we can switch over and talk about the Sonic movies for a minute, it seems to be that those are serving a similar purpose.

Is the plan to keep gradually introducing these characters film by film, almost keeping the Sonic cinematic universe and the Sonic game universe as two separate entities with different levels of prior expected knowledge?

Yeah. For the first Sonic movie we only really had Sonic in there because we really wanted to present Sonic as the character to people, to make sure people understood who the character was. Then as we got into the next movie we introduced Tails and Knuckles a little bit more.

The movie makers really wanted to make sure that when they’re making the movie it’s going to be something anyone can jump in and watch, and it’s not showing all these characters that gamers know, gamers have tons of years with these characters and understanding them.

They don’t want people to go see the movie and end up feeling like: “Oh, I don’t know any of these characters, what’s going on, well I guess this isn’t for me, this is for hardcore gamers that know this already.” They really wanted people to come in and have a great movie experience and get to learn about the characters and grow with the characters through that movie progression.

So that’s from the filmmakers’ perspective, that was their whole idea and they really wanted to make sure that anyone could come in, watch the movie, understand who the characters were and have a really fun time watching it.

“They don’t want people to go see the movie and end up feeling like: ‘Oh, I don’t know any of these characters, what’s going on, well I guess this isn’t for me, this is for hardcore gamers that know this already.'”

CrossWorlds is a multi-format release, but when it comes to releasing Sonic games on any system – be that karting or platforming – do you personally prefer releasing on PlayStation and Xbox where there’s no red-capped rival to compete against, or do you like releasing on Nintendo consoles because there’s stronger competition there – not just from Mario games but others in those genres – and you want to see how Sonic stacks up head-to-head against them?

So, for the past nine or ten years we’ve actually had a different strategy and thought process for our Sonic games. We really want Sonic to be everywhere, we want him to be on all platforms, and we want all platforms to have that great Sonic experience.

So as long as you want to play that Sonic game, there’s going to be no barrier in your way to stop you from playing that Sonic game. No matter what hardware you have, you can come and enjoy our Sonic games.

Especially for this title, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, we’re on all platforms because we want everyone to play this game, but it’s even going the next step and saying we do have an online experience and we realise we’re across all these different platforms, and we don’t want one of these platforms to maybe not have enough people to matchmake with.

So we are integrating cross-platform play, so no matter what platform you’re on you can still play with more people worldwide, and really get that great Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds online experience no matter which platform you’re purchasing.

Apologies for ending on a negative note, but there were some leaks leading up to Summer Game Fest which revealed some Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds characters, including the Minecraft content. I wonder how that affected the team, who had obviously been preparing to make this big surprise announcement.

This is just a general response, not anything specific to this game, but from a publishing perspective, the publisher is always trying to control, and plan, and organise, and present information and surprises to people to have the most fun and get the most attention, get people as excited as best as possible.

And a lot of the people who leak this information are ruining that experience. They’re ruining the plans that people have put into place. In the event that you’re dealing with licensed content, sometimes that leak will destroy a deal and now you can’t do some stuff because someone leaked something.

We realise a lot of people really, really want to know immediately all this great, cool, fun stuff but ultimately when people leak they’re ruining the plans and potentially ruining the content, and we’d really like people to think about that and maybe not do this kind of negative stuff so much.