The hardware gave us a lot of new opportunities. We didn't know what Sonic would be in a 3D environment – we had to go through a lot of trial and error to make it work. There were so many challenges we had to face. It was the first time that Sonic evolved from a 2D side-scrolling platformer to a 3D action adventure. "That game was a personal highlight for me," recalls producer Takashi Iizuka, "but it was also one of my biggest challenges. We really had to find the rules ourselves."Īt the heart of this dichotomy, though, is Sonic Adventure, the first title of the modern era, and the one where Sonic Team really started experimenting with the character and his world.
However, when we transferred Green Hill Zone from 2D to 3D, there were no rules because it's never been done before. For example, if a title includes Chaos Emeralds, there must always be seven. Internally, we have rules about Sonic games. "The constant challenge was, how do we balance between providing something new and yet provide something that people recognise? For example, with Green Hill Zone, we wanted a fresh experience but we wanted people to recognise it and relate to it.
"The 2D and 3D play styles are totally different," confirms the game's director, Hiroshi Miyamoto. In the old skool levels, Sonic is restricted to his spin and dash moves and a side-scrolling landscape, while contemporary Sonic boasts a dizzying, swooping polygonal environment, together with homing attacks and other refinements that have been added through the years. The narrative explanation for this turbo-charged sprint down memory lane is that a mysterious new enemy is warping space and time new Sonic has somehow gone back in time and met 2D Sonic and the two agree to join forces to defeat their new foe – hopefully without creating any apocalyptic space-time paradoxes or Shadow the Hedgehog 2.Ĭleverly, the game revisits favourite stages and environments from hedgehog history and presents each to us in classic 2D and modern 3D forms. Sonic remains, bloodied, but unflattened.Īnd so here comes Sonic Generations, a celebration of the past two decades of Sonic madness. The combination of Shadow the Hedgehog, the 2006 Sonic the Hedgehog 'reboot' and Sonic Unleashed would have destroyed lesser characters.
Unlike Mario, who has sauntered through the past 20 years gathering plaudits at almost every turn, Sonic has stumbled and fallen, and gotten back up, then fallen again.įor every moment of genius (the first two titles, Sonic Rush, Sonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure) there is often something of a calamity. The history of Sonic is essentially a Picaresque tragicomedy – in the best possible sense of the phrase.
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