If you played video games in the nineties, you know Sonic the Hedgehog. You know how Sega dreamed up its spiky, slightly rebellious hero as an answer to Nintendo’s moustache-wielding, mushroom-chomping Mario character. You also know this was very much the Blur vs Oasis of the gaming world, dividing a whole generation along pixellated battle lines. Were you Sonic or were you Mario? School playgrounds around the world were bitterly divided.
Over the following twenty years, Sega has updated its mascot for every new generation of hardware, providing fresh enemies and revised environments, and bridging the gap between the character’s 2D origins and the three-dimensional worlds of modern games. There have been notable successes: the first four brilliant, revolutionary titles, Sonic Rush on the Nintendo DS, Sonic Adventure 2 on Dreamcast. There have been depressing failures, too (we’re looking at you, extreme sports travesty, Sonic Riders, and you Sonic Unleashed, in which Sonic turns into a, ugh, werehog). But the original creators of the game –Sonic Team – have usually been in full creative control, prodding their progeny forward with little tweaks here and a few graphical flourish there. A gradual evolution, then.
But that is about to change.
Sonic Boom is – Sega claims – a bold new take on its hedgehog icon, a sort of side-universe to the main series. David Corless, the global brand director for Sonic, likens it to the way Marvel and DC often have multiple comic book titles for each of their major super heroes. Developed as part of Sega’s current publishing deal with Nintendo, the game will launch only on Wii U and 3DS in the autumn. Who could have imaged a deal like that when Sonic arrived to challenge the Mario hegemony in 1991? Meanwhile, leading French animation studio OuiDo has been brought in to create a companion animated series to coincide with the launch – it’s the first new TV outing for Sonic since the anime series Sonic X ten years ago, and the first to to be developed in CGI. Sega has also inked a deal with Tomy to produce a range of tie-in action figures and playsets. This is a true cross-generation lunge at Sonic’s still vast fan base.
At the heart of it all is a co-op action adventure, allowing two players to team up and take on Sonic’s archenemy Dr Eggman and his hordes of metallic minions. Early teaser trailers, however, hint that a major new enemy is being added, although Sega is of course, remaining tight-lipped for now. What we do know is there are four familiar heroes to choose from – Sonic, naturally, and his friends Knuckles, Tails and Amy, each with their own specific moves and abilities.
What will immediately strike veteran fans is the pretty radical re-design of these familiar platforming icons. Sonic now has a dashing scarf (yes, hedgehogs accessorise) and athletic tape wrapped round his wrists, like a boxer. Also... he has completely blue arms now. Blue arms! They were sort of flesh coloured before – and have been since the beginning. He looks grown up. Which is the point. “The objective was to make the characters instantly recognisable as being from Sonic Boom,” says Bob Rafei, the creative director at LA-based studio Big Red Button, which is handling the new title. “We explored various costume options and quickly found the limits of what works and what doesn’t. Since we wanted to push the characterisation of Sonic and friends to fit our narrative, I thought it more appropriate to make them a touch older by adjusting their head, hand and feet proportions. The athletic tape hints at a team that is ready for any action – it is about practicality rather than vanity. Given they have very clean graphic lines, it was important not to clutter their silhouettes, so any little addition had to be carefully considered. They are designed for an epic action adventure.”
The emphasis of the game will be on how the characters collaborate through each level. Sonic has speed (duh), but Knuckles has strength, Tails has his gadgets, and Amy wields her usual gigantic hammer. On top of this, the studio has added a new mechanic, the ‘ener-beam’ a sort of elastic force that links the two player characters together. This is clearly a way of preventing players from straying too far apart on screen, but it can also be exploited in useful various ways – for example, stretching the link to its limit in order to catapult one character over a chasm or into an enemy. It’s a weird concept, it sounds sort of awkward, but at least it is new.
Rafei insists he was determined to avoid some of the cliches of cooperative play. “It was one of our biggest challenges,” he says. “We constantly had to remind ourselves not to fall into the trap of creating babysitting, escort or protection style scenarios where one player is gated by the other simply for the sake of co-op. What we don’t want is forced co-op play resulting in excessive interruption to gameplay momentum. Through extensive play-testing we settled on the right balance of opportunistic moments in combat and co-op environmental puzzles placed at key moments that are meaningful to the player.”
So what sort of game is it really? A 3D platformer? An open-world adventure? Rafei, who once worked at world renowned studio Naughty Dog on titles like Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter, says the team was most heavily inspired by Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and the later Sega Dreamcast game, Sonic Adventure, which shifted the feel of the series from platforming to 3D action and exploration. “Sonic 2 had a ‘team’ vibe between Sonic and Tails and we wanted to recapture that plus kick things up a notch by adding Amy and Knuckles to the equation,” he explains. “In Sonic Adventure, the game’s structure offered exploration and discovery that opened up more as the player progressed. We believe this is a great approach and modelled Sonic Boom after it. We also love what Sonic Team did with Sonic Generations, giving the player 2D and 3D variations of the same level. Our take was to integrate 2D and 3D seamlessly within the level in a way that made sense, keeping things fresh for the player.”
The environments we’ve glimpsed will be very familiar to Sonic veterans. Lush green hills, azure skies, glowing beaches extending off into a nuclear explosion of a sunset. This time though, everything has been designed with both a game and an animated TV series in mind. The developers at Big Red Button worked closely with OuiDo to get the look of the characters and the world just right, using some of the same art and CGI assets and sharing their ideas with Sonic Team’s Japanese heads who oversaw and advised on the whole project. “There was lots of collaboration on the design side,” says OuiDo executive producer, Evan Baily. “On the TV side, our director, Natalys Raut-Sieuzac, led the way, along with Sandrine and OuiDo’s team of designers. We had creative sessions in San Francisco, Paris, and Tokyo, with people talking all at once in three different languages. It was very exciting to put our heads together to find a look that felt true to the DNA of Sonic, but also new.“
• Sonic Boom – the reinvention of a gaming icon, in pictures
The result is that both the game and the TV series take ideas and inspiration from each other. “Game and TV animation are different animals so we looked for opportunities to cross-pollinate ideas,” says Rafei. “Characters that were developed for the game crossed over to the show and vice versa. Guidelines we developed with Sonic team for bosses, as example, were carried over to the show in effort to have consistency.“
A key concern for Big Red Button has apparently been to explore the unique touchscreen interfaces of the Wii U and 3DS consoles. The former comes with its GamePad controller, which features its own screen like a tablet PC. “The GamePad display has given us a great solution for local co-op play,” says Rafei. “We tried different solutions for our co-op camera, including single split-screen display, but ultimately this wasn’t able to service our game vision. The GamePad also has a look-around mode where the player can scan the environment looking for clues and hints to secrets in the game. As for 3DS, there are some crossover plans between it and the Wii U involving special unlocks for Sonic fans who have both versions.”
With firm details of the game rather lacking right now, skeptical Sonic veterans will no doubt feel they have been here, or hereabouts before. Sega has promised great things from previous Sonic reinventions, but the games have always been anchored to the immutable origins of the character as a 2D hero, a relic of the Mega Drive era. Sega conceded to this with its 2011 title Sonic Generations, which mixed 2D stages in with 3D environments, tugging at the heartstrings of nostalgic fans. Sonic is, in someways, gaming’s Star Wars, an entertainment brand lodged in the memories of thirty-something fans who remember how they once idolised the series but have then had to put up with years of diminishing returns. There have been bright spots, certainly, but can we ever find our way back to Sonic 1, 2 or 3, to the sheer design genius that drove Yuji Naka, Naoto Ōshima and Hirokazu Yasuhara to disrupt the sedate flow of the platforming genre?
Sonic Boom, then, has a lot to prove. Keeping fans onboard while attempting to ensnare the eight-to-11 year-olds will be a huge challenge. And we’ve seen far too little to know how it has been met. No doubt Sega will be showing more of the game at the huge E3 video game conference in Los Angeles in June. And the publisher is currently working on deals with TV channels to host the 11min animated episodes. This new action adventure, with its emphasis on comic escapades and an older cast, carries a lot of weight on its re-energised shoulders. The Sonic vs Mario wars may be officially over, but some of us still root for Sega’s spiky icon. This is an intriguing offshoot, but let’s hope it shoots off in the right direction.
