Sonic's human start, lapses in quality, future 2D/3D outings
A portion of a Eurogamer interview with SEGA's Takashi Iizuka...
Eurogamer: Sonic arrived in tandem with the Mega Drive - how much was that console responsible for his creation?
Takashi Iizuka: At first, in the Mega Drive era, we really wanted to sell the hardware. Sega wanted to create an action figure that really showed what the hardware could do. We did an internal competition to get all the developers to come up with characters and proposals.
At the time Yuji Naka and Naoto Oshima were actually working on a game that was separate from all this, but it fed into it. It wasn't a hedgehog at first, and we made him blue after the corporate colours.
Eurogamer: What was he at first?
Takashi Iizuka: At the very, very beginning he was a human, and the concept was to have him move around this smooth environment rather than this blocky level design, and the idea was to have him keep moving at that high speed, and keep the one-button gameplay. It's quite hard to do that with a human, but with a hedgehog he can roll up into a ball and jump, and that's his attack. It allows for really simple input.
Eurogamer: There have been a steady stream of Sonic games, but the quality's not always been there - what's been your biggest regret while working on Sonic?
Takashi Iizuka: From the first Sonic up to Heroes, it was one team - and more or less the same people creating the titles. And these titles we created, we learned from the mistakes of the previous games, and that's how we did things; each game would be bigger and better than the last.
After that, the Sonic franchise became too big for one relatively small team, so we started to delegate to other people, including external studios. We started to see different types of Sonic, because everyone's got their own vision of what Sonic should be. It became really hard to control the direction as well as the quality of the titles - and that's one thing I regret.
Eurogamer: Generations mixes 2D and 3D Sonic - which one's going to take precedent in the future of the series?
Takashi Iizuka: We'll continue doing both. I can't say too much, but of course we've already released Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I, and we've started work on Episode 2. For the 3D games, we'll continue exploring that too.
Eurogamer: Sonic arrived in tandem with the Mega Drive - how much was that console responsible for his creation?
Takashi Iizuka: At first, in the Mega Drive era, we really wanted to sell the hardware. Sega wanted to create an action figure that really showed what the hardware could do. We did an internal competition to get all the developers to come up with characters and proposals.
At the time Yuji Naka and Naoto Oshima were actually working on a game that was separate from all this, but it fed into it. It wasn't a hedgehog at first, and we made him blue after the corporate colours.
Eurogamer: What was he at first?
Takashi Iizuka: At the very, very beginning he was a human, and the concept was to have him move around this smooth environment rather than this blocky level design, and the idea was to have him keep moving at that high speed, and keep the one-button gameplay. It's quite hard to do that with a human, but with a hedgehog he can roll up into a ball and jump, and that's his attack. It allows for really simple input.
Eurogamer: There have been a steady stream of Sonic games, but the quality's not always been there - what's been your biggest regret while working on Sonic?
Takashi Iizuka: From the first Sonic up to Heroes, it was one team - and more or less the same people creating the titles. And these titles we created, we learned from the mistakes of the previous games, and that's how we did things; each game would be bigger and better than the last.
After that, the Sonic franchise became too big for one relatively small team, so we started to delegate to other people, including external studios. We started to see different types of Sonic, because everyone's got their own vision of what Sonic should be. It became really hard to control the direction as well as the quality of the titles - and that's one thing I regret.
Eurogamer: Generations mixes 2D and 3D Sonic - which one's going to take precedent in the future of the series?
Takashi Iizuka: We'll continue doing both. I can't say too much, but of course we've already released Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I, and we've started work on Episode 2. For the 3D games, we'll continue exploring that too.
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