The Fall of Sonic Team: Sega's Collapse, Crunch, and Chaos

did you know that the director of the early 3d sonic games lost over 20 pounds in just a few months due to the intense development crunch of sonic heroes or that sonic adventure 2 was produced by only about one-fifth of the staff that had worked on the first game just a dozen people quietly chipping away while in the background sega inched towards insolvency laid off a third of its workforce and faced a mass exodus of talent or that shadow the hedgehog's standalone game may genuinely only exist because its director played jack 2 while recovering from sonic heroes we tend to hear pretty constantly actually about sonic's and i quote rough transition to 3d alongside vague statements about the poor quality of many sonic games it's just one of those facts that we're all supposed to hear and go oh yeah it was all bad and never think much about i've dove into passing detail about some of these behind the scenes stories when i documented my journey of learning to love sonic adventure 1 and trying but sadly failing to find that same love for its sequel in fact i didn't ever intend to cover sa2 or heroes or shadow because i didn't think i'd add much to the already pretty loud conversation until i started realizing just how much sega struggles defined what these games would become how these very struggles continue to define every major sonic game since and how we've seen the blue blur for much of the decade afterwards and yet practically nobody in games media has cared to put any of this info together in one place well no more this isn't going to be a retrospective covering the games themselves in great detail because honestly i'm not that huge of a sonic guy even though i do keep trying to appreciate these games more and i don't have much that's nice to say about heroes or shadow so why say much at all this is the true story of the unbelievable chaos that caused sonic's darkest days [Music] with the japanese launch of the sega dreamcast in november 1998 and sonic adventure 1 shortly thereafter came at least three major changes to what we know as sonic team if you've seen my sonic adventure 2 retrospective a lot of this will already sound familiar change number one was that sega's chairman isau okawa tasked the team with developing an online focused title sonic team according to its head and one of the hedgehog's creators yujinaka did not want to do this but every other sega team already had a project on its plate since this order was coming from the very top of the company actually the top of sega's parent company from a man who was so certain that online gaming would be the future that he paid millions of dollars of his own personal money towards this project naka and sonic team had no choice this game would eventually become fantasy star online although first a portion of sonic team would end up developing choo choo rocket as a way to test out many of the dreamcast's online capabilities this brings us to change number two right after sonic adventure 1 released in japan 11 members of the game's 50-plus person production staff were relocated from tokyo to san francisco to translate and localize adventure for the dreamcast western launch in september 1999. this offshoot studio led by sonic adventure's director takashi azuka would be known as sonic team usa and it also further polished the game taking care of many of the bugs and issues that were left in the original release simply due to a lack of time at the end of the hefty production crunch this as many sega fans know was not the first time that parts of sonic's development team were based in the united states in fact after sonic 1 the mainline series was predominantly developed in california key staff members such as yujinaka moved to san francisco to work under mark cerny on sonic 2. the following year takashi azuka crossed the pacific to work on sonic 3 and begin his nearly 30 years and counting stint with the hedgehog and when asked why he hauled part of sonic team back to the states after adventure 1 izuka simply said i wanted to move there i thought sonic was very suitable for the us market so i wanted to develop the character and the games in the us i think it's easier to understand the market if you live there to some extent you could say that sonic team usa's distance from sega's japanese headquarters provided the team a bit of insulation from the chaos during a wildly tumultuous era where the company continued to bleed money and staff that financial strife brought about change number three a handful of the sonic team staff still back in japan including sonic's original designer naoto oshima perhaps saw the writing on the wall and left sega to found their own independent studio artoon in mid-1999 later developing blinks the time sweeper now you might be wondering if sonic adventures developers all either left the country to localize the game left sega entirely or were working on other totally different games who was responsible for sonic adventure 2 that would be sonic team usa those 11 people that relocated to fix up adventure 1. to reiterate the first sonic adventure featured over 60 members in its day-to-day production staff adventure 2 was produced with about 20 percent of that and in its earliest stages not even that many see one sonic adventure's international version was ready for release at least a few of those 11 brave souls immediately left into quality assurance on chuchu rocket presumably because sonic team japan was spread so thin across its multiple tasks having lost a third of its workforce in the last year that it needed a bit of a hand getting the game over the finish line the rest of sonic team usa like all eight of them likely began proper work on what would become sonic adventure 2 around november 1999 aiming for a release date in spring 2001 now perhaps surprisingly despite the leaner staff takashi azuka the director of both adventure games and later the director of heroes and shadow as well as we'll get into later doesn't recall many hurdles that came up during essay 2's production compared to the first games that's likely because he was used to working in this smaller team environment rather than a huge crew and also because sonic adventure 1 was being developed alongside a console that didn't have finalized specs using a third dimension that nobody in game development was quite sure yet how to navigate or perhaps there was simply less of a burden on his shoulders knowing that the future of sega itself wasn't at stake with sonic adventure 2 like it absolutely was with one i truly don't believe folks recognized today just how dire things that sega were in 1999 we all know it was bad but bad doesn't even begin to describe it following the sega saturn's launch and immediate death in the u.s the main region keeping sega's hardware dreams afloat throughout rapidly falling global profits company chairman okawa had actively pushed to abandon the money pit of even producing consoles and to instead lean into sega's strong software catalog as a third-party developer clearly he lost that battle because there is a dreamcast but despite his disapproval okawa still did his damnedest to make the system a success investing millions of his own dollars into the dreamcast's production and later on paying millions more again out of pocket to bundle in one year of free internet access with every system sold in japan back in the era of absurdly expensive pay by the minute dial up with the playstation 2 looming sega was forced to spend heaps of money that the company just did not have in order to market the dreamcast in the west where still the company didn't have a marketing strategy for the united states whatsoever prior to hiring former reebok marketing exec peter moore the man best known today for allegedly getting halo 2's release date tattooed on his arm for xbox's 2004 e3 presentation according to moore they've got no head of marketing and they're nine months from launch they don't have anything they have no creative they have no designs no brand id we're still even fighting over the name and the japanese were panicked all that money of course quickly ran dry after launch the company lost nearly 400 million dollars in both 1998 and 1999 and even more in 2000 despite the dreamcast initially performing better than expected in the west it sure puts those three big sonic team changes into a bit of a different light now huh well you'd better get ready for a few more changes because all the while that sonic team usa's dirty dozen are apparently having a blast making sonic adventure 2 the company is ablaze around them without any burning rangers to make the save in just the first few months of the year 2000 as the first images and teaser clips for sonic adventure 2 began surfacing online sega underwent a major corporate restructure in japan peter moore became sega of america's third president in nine months only about a year after first joining the company the dreamcast u.s sales suddenly collapsed after a strong first few months and so sega began offering rebates of up to 150 on sales of the 200 dreamcast consoles that they were already selling at a loss all of this just to try to get the system into more people's houses and build up a buffer against the ps2 sega's chairman and long-time chief investor okawa began falling terminally ill with what was reported as either heart failure or a form of late stage cancer and star wars pod racing came to the dreamcast why is that why is that in my notes have you seen my chance cube despite his failing health okawa never gave up trying to keep sega afloat he quietly met with top microsoft executives a number of times including bill gates himself to try and work out some form of dreamcast backwards compatibility or some sort of upgrade path for the soon-to-be xbox at one point trying to sell the company to microsoft outright okawa may have even leaked false rumors of a sale to nintendo so that microsoft might get antsy and buy in but obviously the bluff didn't work in september 2000 a month before the playstation 2's north american launch sega posted another massive financial loss instead of their previously projected profit and with sales continuing to struggle despite effectively selling the dreamcast for less than the price of a dreamcast game by way of rebates and other programs sega of america's executives took a trip to japan to explain to the development teams in no uncertain terms that it was over that the dreamcast was dead except as i brushed past earlier sega of japan earlier in 2000 had undergone a corporate restructure and as part of that the company had spun each of these developers off into mostly autonomous subsidiary companies giving each of these studios leads the ability to just sit there and say no no i don't think so and storm out of this meeting in protest it wouldn't take long for the dam to break on january 23 2001 sonic team japan's fantasy star online released in america after a crunch-induced nine-month delay bringing with it the first playable demo of sonic adventure 2. the very same day that american players first got their hands on what was meant to be the future of online gaming as well as a taste of the sequel to the system's most popular game reports began surfacing that sega was indeed about to abandon that online future and leave the console market sega's stock jumped up 60 percent just on the rumor alone shortly thereafter the official announcement was made that the dreamcast was in fact being discontinued just six weeks later company chairman isa okawa the biggest proponent of both that online future and leaving the console game years prior passed away right before his death okawa outright saved sega from surefire bankruptcy by forgiving several hundred million dollars that he had loaned to the company in recent years to fund the console that he did not want them to make to give that console the best chance at success and to ensure that they would have a chance at weathering the gale force winds of change that were surely coming up ahead okawa donated back to sega all of the stock he owned in the company estimated at almost 700 million dollars worth for my money his story doesn't get talked about enough those wins did in fact come swiftly as sonic adventure 2 neared its release date in june 2001 10 years to the day after sonic 1 had kick-started a short but fierce console war and put sega's name truly on the world map hundreds more sega employees either left the company or lost their jobs to layoffs all while those dozen folks at sonic team usa could do nothing else but chip away thousands of miles from the fires at home this was a game that started production at the peak of the dreamcast as the sequel to the system's far and away most successful game and only about 18 months later it hit store shelves on a dead console that was already being thrown in the bargain bin at those very same stores happy birthday sonic it was a miracle that sonic adventure 2 turned out as well as it did given all of these circumstances oh and by the way because the dreamcast was discontinued months before this game was even released sonic team usa immediately had to get to work porting the game over to the gamecube across the next four to five months so that sonic adventure 2 battle could be released in december in japan in april of 2001 sega unveiled what it referred to as a structural reform plan outlining to shareholders the company's planned cost-cutting measures so that it could turn an overall profit for the first time in half a decade it's a fancy name for a plan that in short was exactly what the late okawa had advocated for for years instead of developing the dreamcast stop making consoles become a multi-platform developer leveraging the company's successful franchises cut out some corporate bloat as usual and utilize sega studios or as they called them world-class content creators same perhaps unsurprisingly it mostly worked there were hiccups when it came to learning and producing for several new platforms as opposed to one that they themselves developed especially considering that hundreds of employees were laid off as part of this restructure but nevertheless sega was able to release over 100 games in a month period most of which were admittedly still part of the dreamcast's last dying breath games that were in production before the dreamcast died even then though in its first 12 months as a multi-platform developer sega still dropped over 40 titles on the ps2 xbox gamecube and gba including sonic adventure 2 battle and the first sonic advance so ideally the story would end here sega learned from its mistakes corrected course and everything was sunshine and amy roses from there the problem was sega still had a dreamcast mentality in a very post-dreamcast era see in late 2001 a game released that practically overnight redefined what gaming looked like what players expected out of this powerful new console generation and that game was grand theft auto 3. it can not be overstated how big of a game gta was historically and a lot of sega's often more arcadey titles paled in comparison in the eyes of both the general consumer and indeed the press sega of america very well noticed this shift sega of japan however was still predominantly run by studios that i would like to remind you were technically autonomous subsidiary companies the same leads that had stormed out of a meeting back in 2000 when they were informed yet again that the dreamcast was indeed failing even in the us the last region propping up sega's hardware hopes and by 2002 those leads generally reported directly to one man who oversaw most if not all of sega's game development let's talk about yujinaka [Music] often referred to as the father of sonic the hedgehog even though that's not exactly true naca has undoubtedly had the single greatest influence on mr needle mouse's evolution throughout the decades he's also kind of a dick when it comes to the games industry and that's not me editorializing browsing through years upon years of interviews reveals a portrait of a man that was genuinely miserable with his job even years prior to his departure naca frequently went on side tangents to trash some of his former co-developers for seemingly no reason at all he undercut or directly contradicted answers provided by other staff members that were doing the exact same press circuits he complained about his job being too much work or work that he didn't want to do while also having a known penchant for taking the credit and glory from those other developers he lamented that his job didn't let him get hands-on with games anymore again sometimes while still seemingly taking credit away from others and he talked about buying expensive cars more than once like out of nowhere he would just talk about the cars that he's bought like like a ferrari and whatnot and it's kind of endearing that he just suddenly talks about his hobbies but this is an interview about sonic heroes i i i don't know that last one is just really funny and weird to me either way at the same time it does feel very much like naka was a man burdened with the weight of an entire company trapped and unable to leave for in his mind the whole house of cards would certainly tumble without his leadership that leadership may have been precisely the problem though see this mentality that he alone was keeping the company afloat was coming from a man who had at least a hand in ensuring the sega saturn's failure by refusing to allow the team developing the system's planned 3d sonic game to use the engine that he'd helped develop for knights incidentally that former co-worker that naca really likes trashing constantly he was working on that project at the exact time that naca said no weird how that works it was also coming from a man who not long after this planned to fire off an entire team working on the dreamcast launch title geistforce because he liked the game's 3d innovations and he wanted to gut the company take their technology and use it for sonic instead he won't help you but he'll make you help him that team quit because naka didn't realize that they spoke japanese and the game was cancelled without any of its engineers able to work on the game anymore because they quit this is the same man who years after the fact insisted that sega actually shouldn't have left the hardware business even in the same breath admitting that they would have 100 gone bankrupt if they had stayed the course he was fine with sega going bankrupt because he wanted to work on hardware and maybe this one is punching down you be the judge but this is the same man seemingly responsible for the decision to make a three-dimensional one-button platformer in the 2020s if it was all just poor decision making that would be one thing but according to a 2007 blog post by an at the time sega of europe staffer it was naka's quote massive ego that kept a dedicated separate studio publicly known as sonic team all while corporate restructures consolidated most of the rest of sega in other words sonic's developers were to some extent isolated from the changes in both the company and the industry and they were consistently focused on mostly sonic based projects leading to creative struggles and burnout that arguably had a hand in sonic 06 being developed by a team in japan rather than sonic team usa the team that had worked on the previous three 3d sonic games now this was just an at the time anonymous venti style the blog post venti being venting not uh starbucks large i should not have said that it's hard to say that its writer ben andak had an unbiased lens on sonic team or naca himself so perhaps his judgment was misplaced is what i would say if not for the prior context that i just went over and if not for corroboration by peter moore former sega of america ceo moore has many times over documented his chaotic tenure at sega including taking over sega of america as a very ill-prepared worker mere months after being hired just to produce the dreamcast's marketing campaign and later being the very person that had to set up the fateful dreamcast as dead meeting the one that people walked out of and also he's the one who set up the many warning meetings before that in which sega of japan just plugged its ears or something to the dreamcast not performing well i guess according to moore yujinaka was quote a tad conceited and by and large resistant to the industry's shifting winds determined to just keep doing what sega had been doing for decades considering he would have rather had the company burned down than stop making hardware yeah that checks out in moore's own words sega was dominated by the developers to the extent where sega as a company couldn't move if nakagawa-san you suzuki iguchi weren't into it so in late 2002 moore filmed a focus group meeting in which he asked the respondents if a video game publisher was a relative or a friend who would they be the focus group's responses were pretty telling rockstar was the cool drunk uncle ea was a jock but what about sega yeah that's your granddad used to be cool but even he can't remember why anymore he then brought a translated copy of this video to the japanese offices for a meeting and immediately naka accused moore of either doctoring the footage or forcing the focus group's responses because everybody knows that sega is a great company moore's response i said to the translator tell him to [ __ ] off and the poor guy looks at me and says there's no expression in japanese i said i know there is and that was it that was the last time i ever set foot in there this isn't just some one-off boast where the whole room totally clapped afterwards either moore has told this story several times over the years and has been remarkably consistent in his retelling in january 2003 just a month after that meeting moore received a job offer from microsoft wherein he'd helped develop the xbox's brand identity leading into the xbox 360. moore resigned from sega within the week effectively leaving sega of america rudderless once again and ensuring that naka's grip on sonic team continued its isolation from both the industry and sega itself [Music] of course throughout much of this tumultuous 2002 the different sub-branches of sonic team kept their heads down and just gun trucked ahead in japan production began on billy hatcher and the giant egg and sonic team usa was tasked with following up adventure 2. however there were concerns about creating a third adventure title as it risked the series niching down even further and beginning to perhaps only appeal to the most core of sonic fans or more specifically the most core of adventure fans leaving both newcomers and classic 2d fans behind that's not to mention the fact that sega was now producing games for all three major consoles with millions of brand new potential customers that maybe hadn't played either adventure game although all of sonic team usa's now 19-person staff had been involved in some way in making the adventure series producing a third one would mean needing to port the first two to xbox and ps2 with manpower that simply wasn't there given the layoffs and departures hell sonic adventure's gamecube release was only barely in development by the time that sonic heroes started in spring of o2 and sega's staffing cuts meant that this so-called director's cut of adventure was not in fact directed by sonic adventures actual director he would be too busy losing 20 pounds crunching on sonic heroes all while sega underwent another corporate shake-up 2002 marked sega's first reported annual profit in a half decade that structural reform plan had led to a faster turnaround than even sega itself had projected it'd be strange then to continue changing the corporate hierarchy in a normal company given that fact in case it wasn't clear yet sega was not a normal company see out of a fear that the reform plan might not cover the company with regard to upcoming debts sega had started seeking a possible merger with two other companies namco and a company perhaps best known for developing pachinko slot machines named sami rumors continued swirling at the time about a possible microsoft buyout and even ea at one point was rumored to enter into talks but the real wars here were between namco and sami and between sega and getting out of its own way in february 2003 sega formally announced its plans to merge with sami only to break off that marriage in may allegedly due to a disagreement about the proposed management after the merger see sega's execs allegedly wanted the reins to the company even though they would only make up about 20 percent of the sega sammy combined company to which i can only assume sami's board members stared blankly back and said do you know what you've done the last few years namco also rescinded its merger offer only a few hours after this because yes even though sega had already publicly announced plans to merge with another publicly traded company they were still having backdoor talks about merging with namco anyway now i'm not a lawyer or anything especially not when it comes to japanese finance law or business or anything like that obviously so maybe it's just my my dumb stupid layman brain here that sounds illegal as [ __ ] but putting that aside namco rescinded that offer because sega refused to give them an actual response they ghosted pac-man which i guess now that i think about it actually is kind of fitting but raise your hand if you expected a love triangle in this story oh and by the way this all happened in the same seven day period during which sonic heroes was revealed at e3 as a result of this very public fiasco sega's president and ceo each stepped down with the new president announcing plans to further consolidate not just the corporate teams but the development teams as well meaning another few hundred developers were about to lose their jobs this move wouldn't immediately affect sonic team allegedly thanks to yujinaka's pull within the company and insistence that sonic team keep its name and relative autonomy but it's likely this move is what would later lead to sonic team usa getting renamed anyway and then eventually pulled back to japan for the time being though the team in san francisco just kept trudging along all while these merger talks were floating privately and then very publicly in a very dirty laundry kind of fashion sonic team usa sought to reach those millions of potential newcoming players by developing a game simultaneously across all three consoles and even on pc a fresh entry point to the series for the kids too young to have had a sega system or the pc port of sonic 3 that one of you is going to mention in the comments right now this meant developing a game that could run equally well across the different hardware architectures which in turn meant developing what azuka described as an all-new game engine for the very first time sonic team usa began utilizing third-party development tools such as the renderware engine to help bear some of that weight they attempted to build around the lowest common denominator the weakest of the consoles that being the ps2 in order to avoid arduously spending time optimizing for each platform one by one this ps2 version as many sonic fans know is far and away the worst version performance wise even despite the game from day one catering to the console's memory limitations naturally this worst version performed the best in terms of sales with 17 percent of sonic heroes official worldwide sales coming from british ps2 owners alone not even counting north america japan or elsewhere as the first truly multi-platform sonic game heroes is one of the best selling across the entire franchise so if you ever wondered why there's this sonic stigma at least a sizable amount of that comes from a few million people's first sonic game being the ugliest and buggiest version of an already sometimes buggy sonic heroes despite sonic team usa's focus on attracting new players though it's still aimed to touch the hearts of both classic fans with references to the genesis games and adventure stalwarts by bringing back a wide cast of returning characters this was also to avoid a situation like had happened prior to adventure 2 where fans kept wondering where tails was in pre-release info trailers and screenshots for heroes the mentality was to be everyone's here metal sonic got him the deep cut team chaotix only ever seen on the failed sega 32x yep my dad surprisingly he's here too and he's he he's he's throwing it back you get him you get him pops teddy horny one thing that did not return however were the flickies those little animals that would fly out of eggman's robots when they were destroyed something featured in both the genesis games and the adventure saga this cut was made to try and differentiate heroes from the prior 3d titles with director takashi azuka stating we removed the flickies so that users who played sonic adventure wouldn't be confused into thinking that there was a chow garden somewhere it's an interesting but kind of fair thing to cut when you understand that reasoning except for the fact that another part of sonic team was close to releasing the sonic mega collection which brought all of those genesis games flickies and all into the homes of millions of kids in fact that collection outsold sonic heroes on some platforms and contains the actual flicky game from the mega drive it's also kinda weird to cut flickies specifically to avoid the chow garden confusion when you put chow in this game like there's a new character named cream that was created specifically for sonic heroes that has her own chao there are a few missions that ask you to collect or save chao it's it's a little strange is all but given the chao garden's popularity it still is pretty fair and azuka sometimes gives odd interview answers anyway speaking of izuka left the door pretty open for the future with regards to sonic adventure continuing the sonic adventure series has not ended though so theoretically the chow garden could return sometime heroes is its own new franchise yujinaka supported this in an earlier interview too saying the adventure series is completed wait in order to accommodate so many characters sonic heroes settled on a team-based gameplay approach each team of three would have a speed based character a flying character and a powerhouse each of them bringing their own different route options and allowing players to swap between the trio at any time to utilize one hero's abilities although heroes originally aimed for six teams this was immediately scaled back to four distinct campaigns team sonic with sonic tails and knuckles team chaotix with knuckles old cohorts sbo charmy and vector team rose featuring amy my dad and newcomer cream the rabbit and lastly there's team dark bringing back rouge and adding a new eggman robot e123 omega to replace gamma since he's dead and never coming back and replacing shadow who's supposed to be dead and never coming back is it it's it's shadow originally shadow wasn't planned to be included in sonic heroes in fact his death in sonic adventure 2 was meant to be like gamma before him an actual death the final time we'd see the character however according to azuka in a 2011 panel as you know in the story shadow is only meant to appear in that single title but because of the reaction of the fans we decided to bring him back in sonic heroes and eventually you saw him in his own title and frankly that's a good call his popularity even to this day is incredible even if the way shadow was written back into things is not anyway whatever the reason for his return shadow's team comprises the hard mode of this game with team sonic being the standard difficulty team chaotix making up a bunch of pretty out-there challenges rather than the usual get to the end objectives and team rows is meant to be the easy mode what's interesting is that perhaps due to some sort of oversight during development nowhere in the game is that actually stated like the manuals imply that the shorter team rose stages are suitable for younger players and dazuka and naca really hammered home in almost every sonic hero's interview that team rose is designed for beginners but i really like the idea of most kids that never read any of those interviews just playing these campaigns in order getting to the third story right after finishing the hard one and being forced to play the tutorial yeah the outwardly girly campaign's level 1 is straight up the actual tutorial and it's unskipable because i guess girls just don't play video games that's kind of [ __ ] up it's even better than that team rose has for my money the best designed levels in the game simply due to them being so simple i mean it still runs into significant issues with game feel and slippery controls particularly in the throwback special stages and even the bosses in team rose failed at what azuka suggested was their intended goal the boss stage designer had a new concept in mind with this game because he didn't want the game to lose the momentum built in the normal stages in many action games you're moving quickly through the regular stages but the momentum completely stops at the boss here we keep the momentum on the move while you fight the boss but thanks to being built for wimpy baby gamers team rose's levels are far shorter than any other campaign where they start to feel like bloated repetitive marathons where set pieces often feel like they're almost cut and pasted multiple times per stage it also helps that these simpler level designs naturally lead to team rose sporting far fewer of the game's infamous overuse of grind rails and bottomless pits either way love it or hate it sonic heroes has some really glaring level design issues but if i get into them i'd be getting a new analysis and like i said before i don't have much nice to say so i'd rather not say too much at all i learned my lesson from essay 2. instead i'll say that heroes has an absurdly good reason for said issues the level design for sonic heroes was made by two people me and one other person as we got to the later stages of development this other person got pretty sick and didn't show up to work so level design was made by one person so for those very last stages of the game i didn't sleep at all and i was constantly working i lost about 22 pounds because i was just cranking away and it was just work work work i didn't sleep because i had to finish the game on my own almost dying when sonic heroes was first revealed at e3 in may 2003 after a year of production and with only about six months to go before discs had to be printed eurogamer as well as other organizations at the expo were informed by sega representatives that the game was about 20 percent complete it's unclear exactly when hiro's other level designer fell ill but it seems likely that this game's director was rolling solo on level design duties for well over half of the final product stages in a game with four distinct campaigns each containing 14 levels that are often significantly different from the other three campaigns why didn't sonic teams lead and this game's producer yujinaka the man who was already being tapped to have a direct hand in the development of every single sega game or for that matter anybody at the company attempt to send in any cavalry to help support their mascot's must-win multi-platform debut well remember plans were already being set in motion to lay off another 10 to 20 percent of the company's development workforce suck it up i guess there's almost a point in this game where you can tell that one poor man was doing all of the level design work on his own heroes is simply a game that ended up being maybe a bit overzealous in scope but also a game stricken with just really really bad luck that doesn't excuse the issues that heroes have not just for myself but for many many other players but it certainly explains them and it makes me appreciate the game a bit more in a sort of how the hell did they pull this off at all kind of way the answer is perhaps they didn't at least not on time by the time heroes was revealed sega was already positioning it for an early 2004 release in the west but it's very likely that all of this crunching even before the game's announcement led to a soft delay after all it's hard to imagine that sega actively chose to skip the lucrative holiday sales only to release not even a week into 2004 especially when you consider that heroes was meant to be the capstone in sega's quote-unquote year of sonic marketing for the year 2003 alongside sonic advance 2 the sonic x cartoon and sonic adventure dx when you factor in that sega was still trying to secure some sort of merger throughout 2003 leading into 2004 it's likely that sonic heroes just couldn't be delayed any further out without severely damaging the company's fiscal reports and thus possible merger discussions but who knows maybe they just wanted to ensure they'd be the best-selling game of the month after all based on the merger fiasco sega clearly had a thing about being the prettiest girl in the room at the time by the way they lost to nfl street although azuka had expressed interest in turning the hero's team up concept into a series all its own the game's middling response very quickly killed that idea once production on heroes wrapped up sonic team usa cashed in a well-earned break so that azuka could hopefully um eat and of course catch up on some games that he missed during crunch time this year has been hellish for me normally i find the time to check out the big titles but this year i had no time now that sonic heroes is done i want to check out some of the really good american developed games like jack 2 and ratchet and clank going commando jack 2. oh dear god [Music] as if the prior few years didn't sound tumultuous enough 2004 brought another major shake up at sega after the very public embarrassment that was sega's 2003 merger woes sammy came back to the table buying the last 22 percent of sega that was owned by csk holdings the company run by sega's late president okawa in may sega announced even better year-over-year profits thanks in no small part to sonic heroes having a strong first few months of sales plus also all of those layoffs the following day sammy announced that it would purchase the rest of sega outright completing the merger later in the fall not everybody at sega was thrilled with this announcement fearing more budget cuts and layoffs and to be fair they were right one of the first steps leading to october's merger was that all of sega's studios which as you might recall were spun off into individual companies back in 2000 were reabsorbed back into sega proper this meant among other things that the company known as sonic team limited was not long for this world and that sonic team as we know it was about to assimilate into the larger sega research and development studios we can only assume that the sonic team company's ceo yujinaka was not very pleased with this but if nothing else he was seemingly able to keep much of sonic team isolated as its own well team but what would become of sonic team usa well around 2004 once sonic team was reabsorbed into sega the american branch of that now non-existent sonic team company was formally renamed to sega studios usa informally the studios project still continued using the sonic team name so i'm going to continue calling the group sonic team usa just to avoid confusion whatever their name might have been the american team's fate had already been decided as far as their next project the japanese studio was to develop a sonic game in the standard style and the us studio was to develop something different which could contribute to the sonic franchise that's right once sonic team japan finished up work on its astro boy video game in late 2004 if you want more info on that game by the way it is fascinating check out my editor mykonos fans video on it here the japanese branch would begin work on a next-gen sonic game while the american team would stay on the current gen and was tasked with finding another way to reach new players both of these titles independently came into taking a more mature serious tone almost as if peter moore's words from years prior were echoing in the team's minds tell him to god i don't those were not the words that i meant but it still tracks this change of tone for sonic team usa at least was clearly a drastic one in february 2004 right after sonic heroes dropped takashi azuka was asked if he'd ever make a game where sonic started shooting hookers that's a real question he was asked yes and azuka laughed it off i have no plans for that and i have a good reason it's been 12 years since sonic first came out and everybody who experienced it back then are now old enough to have their own children it's a chain of sonic fans that's forming and i'd like to keep this chain going if i changed sonic to appeal to adults it would cut the chain right off moments later he talked about wanting to play jack 2. you do the math looking at shadow's popularity and wanting to continue part of the story set up across sonic adventure 2 and sonic heroes the decision was made to try another time at making a successful sonic spin-off series for this next project however since the writer responsible for both adventure 2 and heroes was busy at work on the next gen sonic game i'm sure that one's turning out well izuka would take the helm as writer in addition to his usual work as director and level designer thankfully this time around there were three other level designers not just one and the one that had fallen ill during heroes recovered and came back for this game shadow wasn't plagued by the same level of crunch or staffing issues as sonic heroes and yet the manpower didn't actually help the level design all that much at all it truly feels like shadow was an uneven project behind the scenes on most levels of production perhaps a game that was more of a darts at the board endeavor by the brass at sega or soon to be sega sammy rather than a true passion project by sonic team usa for example just like with this game's writing izuka's interviews about shadow were frequently full of contradictions like a lot since we first introduced him in sonic adventure 2 we have wanted to feature shadow in his own game as azuka himself later mentioned shadow was supposed to stay dead also as commenter lioness jenna pointed out shadow was introduced before sonic adventure 2. first introduced in essay two they got that wrong shadow as first introduces in a doomlands happy meal thingy i think because i got one and the essay two wasn't even out then she freaking i just uh i read that and i wanted to share it with you because man that tickled me i'm pretty sure all of that is wrong anyway back to azuka no i did not create shadow the hedgehog only to make it appealing for the u.s market i had all regions in the world in mind when i created this game once again a few years later he finally went ahead and admitted in the us first and third person shooters were popular and we decided to go with a character who could work with them now one thing azuka was consistent on was the technical side of production although heroes had used a new graphics engine mechanically it was a bit of a different story the previous engine that we've been using for sonic is the same engine we've been using since the first sonic adventure for dreamcast it didn't allow some of the things we wanted to do some of the ideas azuka and ko had in mind for shadow's game require destructible environments or new visual effects or or guns or multiple drivable vehicles if you're wondering why shadow's gameplay is somehow even slipperier than heroes despite being a brand new engine i i don't know what to tell you but it's a new engine another fascinating angle that shadow's game took was actually an unused proposal for sonic adventure 2. that game originally toyed with the idea of having branching choice driven gameplay paths before putting a pin in that concept for later due to time and technical constraints shadow did execute on this idea in a pretty interesting way it's outrun although shadow the hedgehog has 22 unique levels you'll only play through six of them on any single playthrough on your way to completing one of the game's 10 endings with your path being chosen based on which mission you complete in any stage on paper it's a pretty strong concept allowing each level to be replayed multiple times so that you can pick your choice of the good bad or sometimes neutral karmic missions which are often wildly different from one another you can even swap between these missions in the middle of the level it's pretty neat putting aside that there's a true ending that negates so many of those karmic choices even though it requires you to play all five of the final stages twice just to get both the good and evil endings for each shadow is a pretty early example of a console game that wasn't an rpg that had these sorts of karmic choices that would become oh so common in the years to come it's a shame then that it's sullied not just by poor gameplay bad level design and pretty hilarious writing but also by a very clear wishy washiness going on behind the scenes upon shadows revealed during sonic's 2005 induction into the walk of game it felt apparent that shadow was trying to push the boundaries of the usual family-friendly sonic series by growing up with the fan base in the same way that a game like jack and daxter did when moving from one to two with guns and swearing except that's not quite what sonic teams seem to be aiming for at least not based on my interpretation in the past several years i have been trying really hard to make sonic the hedgehog appealing to the younger audience and i have done that successfully now my new mission is to capture the older audience to me this sounds more like an attempt to reach a different audience rather than to pull in lapsed fans that maybe grew too old for sonic's kid-friendly image especially since sonic's image had always been up until that point that he was the cool character that contrasted with the usual family friendly mascots izuka mentions in multiple interviews the desire to make a more mature game that wasn't possible with sonic's character after all sonic holding a gun and shooting at actual humans isn't exactly something you can walk back but what's interesting is that part way through production somebody at sega sammy must have pivoted shadow is loaded with small changes clearly made an attempt to walk back the targeted teen rating in the us as 2005 would mark the introduction of the esrb's e10 plus rating spurts of blood were removed when you shot the human soldiers the alien's blood is recolored to green a number of swears are removed from lines or cut entirely they thankfully cut out an entire scene where a child gets shot in other words the goal became to make a game that appeared more mature rather than making one that was this surface level attempt at shifting to match the overton window of what kids thought was cool in a post-grand theft auto 3 world that's supported by naka's comments that sonic team had wanted to make a quote-unquote gun action game for some time by izuka's comments that the choice to go with a shooter was specifically because shooters were popular in the us by the little adjustments revealing the hand of a studio that wanted to have its cake and shoot it too by the hilariously mixed tones that led to the game getting excoriated by critics and fans alike and by the even more mixed tones coming from staff throughout the game's marketing push when azuka was asked why shadow would need a gun in the first place since he's supposed to be the ultimate life form which by the way is the single greatest interview question of all time all he could muster in response was shadow is on a mission to find out about his past and who he is being a rebel he's willing to do whatever it takes to get the answers to the questions he has as if the thought had never occurred to him and if you've seen azuka's writing in this game it probably didn't even if it has some neat but poorly executed ideas it doesn't change the fact that shadow was frankly a transparent cash-in attempt of a game a way to pivot in the exact opposite direction of the successful sonic heroes rather than follow through shadow was even supposed to be its own series according to sega of america's marketing head scott steinberg he's fat i said steinberg we expect shadow the hedgehog to be a cornerstone title in this strategy as well as a new and dynamic brand for sega if not for this game's poor reception it probably would have worked shadow sold pretty well despite itself not nearly as well as heroes but well enough that there'd likely be a shadow too if the first game hadn't poisoned the well even further in the eyes of the general public as far as most folks outside of the core sonic fans were concerned yeah mainline sonic was in a slump meanwhile totally in the background the 2d sonic games produced by developer dimps were thriving under the direction of sonic team's akinuri nishiyama sonic adventure 1's writer and the man who would very soon take over sonic team entirely but that wasn't where the focus was and whatever the reasons behind it sonic team had at first struggled and then crumbled in the spotlight in back to back games while takashi azuka and sonic team usa quietly pushed ahead yujinaka's clear discontent for his position at sega and the stress he felt on his back from in his mind holding the company together it had continued bubbling over the course of both heroes and shadows production all the man wanted to do by this point was drop his responsibilities and get back into the studio to actually work on games not just manage them yes i miss that very much when sega is a little more revitalized i'd like to work more on that side of things in order to realize that i'm working really hard and it wasn't just him i've highlighted the murmuring of other sega staffers the concerns about the company's management and future especially once sammy got involved the clear morale issues not to mention the tension that apparently bubbled between naka and outrun and shenmue creator you suzuki among others there was a heavy heavy cost for sega's return to profitability eventually something was bound to break in the years after shadow the hedgehog's release sonic team usa worked on a few smaller projects namely night's journey of dreams the long-awaited sequel to the cult classic sega saturn game and a passion project of takashi azuka this allegedly wasn't exactly an enthusiastic project by sega sammy's brass however merely a short reprieve from the constant grind of working on sonic a way to thank azuka and the team for their dedication or perhaps a way to pre-thank azuka for his coming career jump this thanks allegedly took the form of sega forcing azuka to change the game's platform a year into planning and months into production because they saw more money in the wii compared to the original plan for an xbox 360 ps3 release not long after knights released at the end of 2007 sonic team usa's staff was moved back to japan to fill the gap left behind after yujinaka and a handful of other sonic team members left sega to found their own independent studio in 2006. from 2006 to 2010 nishiyama the man heading up sonic's successful handheld games filled naka's shoes and led sonic team handing the reins to azuka in 2010. in many ways izuka's career ever since has mirrored yujinaka's before him since beginning his trek up the corporate ladder izuka has only directed a single game the 2009 edition of mario and sonic do sports together moreover his time has been defined by that constant that we hear when it comes to sonic talks about the rough transition to 3d how sonic's had a hard few years how in many folks nearsighted eyes sonic was apparently never even good to begin with it's been punctuated time and again by titles that attempted to reach brand new audiences or further expand the scope of the franchise by way of for example beat em up gimmicks or a run button or create a character or whatever the hell sonic boom was although sega sammy seemingly forced a directive to release sonic games every single year multiple sonic games at that the fading luster of the blue blur led to sega in 2010 removing and delisting any sonic title that had fallen below a metacritic target score even seemingly cutting back on game production to avoid further devaluing the brand with so many games on shelves every single year later that same year sega released four more sonic games one of them being sonic 4 and the other three coming in the span of a single week including the connect sonic freeriders which has a meta score exactly one point above sonic 06 that game is still available digitally and because time has a circle izuka for the third time relocated to america in 2016 this time to take a senior role in producing all of sega's titles just like naca before him and to ensure that a fiasco like sonic boom never happens again even as information has been lighter and harder to find or verify in the post sammy years it at this point goes without saying that sonic team and really all of sega have taken quite some time to recover from the company's near collapse over 20 years ago to this day the studio's decisions with regard to sonic baffle some fans to the point that we've had more sonic movies in recent years then we've had games depending on how you want to count spin-offs and remasters of course the current gap between mainline sonic titles is already the longest we've ever seen even longer than the 4-year wait between sonic and knuckles and sonic adventure i don't feel that's due to a lack of love for the series within sega however and the community surrounding the games is of course as passionate as ever i i won't even try to predict how the next sonic game will turn out but i will say that it's because of that passion that energy within the fandom that i decided to give sonic adventure another shot in the first place after that 30th anniversary concert left me feeling all warm and fuzzy i wouldn't have continued on to learn the fascinating stories behind sonic adventure 2 sonic heroes and shadow the hedgehog that left me appreciating if not necessarily each of the games themselves the amount of work that sonic team was able to pull off despite sega's increasingly chaotic environment at a certain point the waves broke for sega the chaos stopped being an excuse and either corporate oversight or sheer managerial incompetence led to what's happened in the years since we don't know enough about the sami years for it to be fully clear so i'll leave it up to you to decide when and why that was but for these early 3d games for sonic's dark period and indeed for sonic team's downfall the context matters it completely rewrites what we like to think we know about the blue blur and we don't hear it enough hopefully we can change that thanks for watching and as always until next time stay golden [Music] you

Channel: The Golden Bolt

Views: 221,486

Keywords: the golden bolt, sonic, sonic the hedgehog, the fall of sonic the hedgehog, the fall of sonic, sonic heroes, sonic adventure 2, shadow the hedgehog, the history of sonic the hedgehog, sonic's downfall, sonic the hedgehog's downfall, history of sega, history of sonic, sonic the hedgehog retrospective, sonic adventure 2 retrospective, shadow the hedgehog retrospective, sonic development history, sonic heroes development, shadow the hedgehog development

Id: lixTJBSJTzY

Length: 56min 30sec (3390 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 19 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/eldomtom2]

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Sonic Team has consistently made bad choices that are not explainable simply by them being rushed.