Early Sonic Boom Character Designs Were “Traumatic” For The Sonic Team

If you’re a fan of Sonic the Hedgehog and the Sonic franchise, you’ve probably heard that there will be a new Sonic game that will be released later this year. The title is called Sonic Boom and it will be the third and final Sega game that will be an exclusive to Nintendo.

Sure the game will be naturally getting an upgrade in graphics, as is the case with most new games, but if you have been playing Sonic games for many years and you’ve even followed the cartoon back in the day, you’ll notice that Sonic Booms’ Sonic looks a little different from the past.

Based on feedback spotted around the internet, not everyone is a fan of the new design, but gamers can rest assured that it could have been much, much worse.

Speaking to the folks at GameSpot, Bob Rafei, the head of the studio in charge of the character redesigns, revealed that early iterations of the redesign caused much discomfort to the Sonic Team to the point where the Sonic Team’s head, Takashi Iizuka, couldn’t even look at the computer screen because it was apparently the redesigns were too outlandish to the point where it was trauamtic.

“Sonic Team [quickly] came back with their discomfort of that. Early on, when we had our first review of all the crazy things we wanted to try, [Sonic Team head Takashi Iizuka] came down to Los Angeles and looked through all the different concepts. I felt sorry for the guy because sometimes he couldn’t actually look at the screen—it was too traumatic seeing all the crazy stuff we wanted to do.”

However instead of sticking to their guns and keeping the design, the studio realized that they could use it to their advantage, sort of as a yardstick in which they knew how far they were allowed to go with their own creations, but at the same time keeping the folks at the Sonic Team (relatively) happy.

Apparently early designs of the character included features like scales and realistic looking fur. The idea of a walking, talking, blue hedgehog itself is a already unbelievable, so we doubt adding fur and scales would have made it any better. What do you guys think? Anyone else a little bit more grateful that the end product looks like this, rather than what could have been?

Tyler Lee
Categories: Gaming
Tags: Nintendo, sega, sonic