Happy 35th, Sonic: Sonic Team boss on anniversary plans and how Mania inspired new indie collab
Sonic Team boss Takashi Iizuka shares his memories on Sonic’s big birthday
Reflecting on the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise’s 35th anniversary today, Sonic Team boss Takashi Iizuka has little hesitation picking his favorite behind-the-scenes memory of Sega’s blue mascot.
“There have been a lot of great moments in the 35 years, but probably my favorite, and one of the most challenging, was the development of Sonic Adventure,” he says. “At the time, we were taking the classic Sonic game experience and character, and putting that in this brand new world that we hadn’t made before.
“Nobody really had any idea of how this was going to get done or what the final game was going to be before making it. We were figuring it out as we were making it: what the character would look like and how the gameplay would be fun and really work.
“As game director on that title, I felt a lot of responsibility for needing to show all the different leads what the experience was going to be, and not having a clear image in my head before making it was a challenge. It turned out great, but it was a lot of responsibility and a lot of, I think, stress at the time.”
In the years since Adventure’s 1998 release, its spirit of reinvention has slowly become what the series is known for. Just like the hedgehog, the franchise has never really been able to sit still and settle on one singular idea for what a Sonic game should be.
Similarly to how Adventure invented a whole new branch of Sonic games alongside the traditional side-scrolling, Sega has since experimented with RPGs, team-based co-op adventures, fighting games, and more gimmicks than you can launch a Spin Dash at.
Now, Sonic Team is turning to indie developers for the Blue Blur’s next big idea.
“I used to be a Sega employee, so I knew that Sega had a character that had this really wide casual audience,” says Shunsuke Miyake, the designer of acclaimed co-op platformer, Pico Park, explaining the origins of his just-announced collaboration, Sonic Pico Park.
“At the time, we thought there was no way we could make a whole collab game. We thought we’d probably just have to make like skins or some goods, and just try to get our name out there, because we’re a small indie developer.”
To Miyake’s surprise, however, Sonic Team said yes. “I was so shocked when they said, ‘yeah, that sounds like a great idea, let’s do a collab’. It wasn’t just like, ‘let’s do some merch or a skin’, but ‘let’s actually make a game together’. No one was expecting that, and we were really surprised.”
“At the time, we thought there was no way we could make a whole collab game. We thought we’d probably just have to make like skins or some goods”
From Sonic Team’s point of view, Pico Park offered another opportunity to try something new. Pico Park is a puzzle platformer that relies on frequent communication between players, so that they can work together to achieve a goal. More often than not, they’ll fail in hilarious ways, but that’s part of the fun.
Iizuka says, at first, he didn’t know if the indie game could work as a Sonic title. “I was a little bit nervous, but then when I started really thinking about it, all of our Sonic games are standalone single-player games,” he says. “We don’t have those games where four people or five people or eight people are screaming and yelling at each other, playing together, in one screen experience.”
According to Iizuka, what ultimately convinced him to work with the Pico Park team was his experience collaborating with indie developer Christian Whitehead and Headcannon on 2017’s Sonic Mania, which to this day is the joint-highest rated Sonic game ever on Metacritic.
Sonic Mania was a new experience for Sonic Team, he says. “We got to see a different perspective of how they were making games and what they were focusing on creating, and the passion that they bring, and the focus of what their content is going to be, and the fan reaction when they see these indie games really coming to market.
“It was really interesting working with the Sonic Mania team, and we felt that same passion coming from the Pico Park team, being able to make something that maybe we inside of Sega wouldn’t make. They’re bringing this new, fresh idea to the IP into the franchise, so I thought of it as a new challenge, something that’s going to be really fun.”
Q&A: Sonic Pico Park
How did you decide which Sonic elements to include?
Miyake: It’s Sonic Pico Park. We need ‘Sonicness’ in there, and we need to have that Pico Park communication, cooperative multiplayer experience. We started by taking sonic actions and putting them into Pico Park, like Spin Dash, then we realised, oh yeah, this is going to work.
We can have Tails doing a spin dash, Sonic is out in front, Tails, oops, doesn’t stop in time, bumps into Sonic, Sonic falls down… That’s the Pico Park experience. That’s a very Pico Park moment using these Sonic actions.
Are there any hard rules for Sonic collabs?
Iizuka: It’s hard, because there’s such a wide different variety of people who play these games, and each game is designed differently, so it’s hard to have one physical rule.
For example, Sonic Mania was built for the core fans to enjoy, so we wanted to make sure we had a lot of actions that core fans would know how to use and know how to play, and reference things from the past that the core fans really get excited about.
That’s different from Superstars, where we wanted to really design a game where you could play together as a family and have this fun experience playing through a classic Sonic game, even though it’s the 2020s and it’s not the 1990s.
Pico Park is also designed in a similar way. It’s a multiplayer experience where failure is fun, as was mentioned before, and being able to get in there and play together, have that play style when we’re designing our games.
What underrated Sonic character do you think Iizuka should use more?
Miyake: I want them to push Big the Cat, because he’s such a big character. He’s so much bigger than all the other characters that it creates a fun experience. Whatever Big the Cat is doing, it’s going to be something interesting and unique. So, I want more Big the Cat!
With video games now more expensive and complex than ever to create, Iizuka agrees that collaborations like Sonic Pico Park present a viable opportunity for Sega to continue expanding and trying new things with the Sonic series in the future.
“That’s exactly the situation that we’re in,” he tells VGC. “Being able to collaborate with indie game developers brings these fresh ideas of, you know, if we were working inside of Sega, we’d have one idea, but really there’s a lot of pressure to make it bigger, to make it become this bigger thing, which becomes more development time and more money.
“We have games that are doing that, but the freshness is coming from these indie developers that are saying, ‘I’m going to take this one idea, I’m not going to blow it up into this massive thing, but I’m going to make a really good core experience out of that idea’.
“That’s the freshness, and that’s the fun that we get from working with these indie devs. This time it’s with Pico Park, but moving forward, it’s also good to remember the fun of working with indie developers and what they can bring to the table, and we look forward to potentially working with other indie developers in the future.”
Sonic Pico Park was announced at Summer Game Fest earlier this month, alongside a second year of content for Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds. With the big anniversary celebration this year, many fans were expecting a big, mainline game. But Iizuka teases there’s more to come (including today’s announcement of a Switch 2 port of Frontiers).
“You know, this is the 35th anniversary, and we’re always thinking like we need to make sure Sonic fans really enjoy this entire year. We want something that everyone can get excited about,” he says.
“We’re going to have a lot of content in Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds. There is also the Sonic Live concert that will be happening later, so even outside of games, we’re really thinking about all these different ways Sonic fans can celebrate something and enjoy the 35th anniversary.”
He adds: “[Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds year two is] probably the biggest thing that we can talk about now, but you know, we’re always having plans. There’s stuff in the future we can’t talk about just yet, so do stick around. We’re not done with Sonic yet!”
