11/20/2022 0 Comments Sonic animal i have become![]() He eventually married an author of children’s books, and one of her books is the story of the original Sonic the Hedgehog game. The pilot earned the nickname “Hedgehog” due to the way his hair always stood straight up, and the nose art on his plane was an image of Sonic. There was another element of American culture that went into Sonic’s design: Oshima was really into leather jackets, emblems, and airplane nose art at the time, so he presented Sonic to the higher-ups as part of the fictional story of a brave pilot. Instead, he said the team wanted a character that was “cool” because of his attitude - he wouldn’t follow others’ orders and would always fight for what he believed in. “‘Cool’ can be something that’s more on the surface, visual or expressive, or just cool character design.but that wasn’t the cool that we were looking for,” said Oshima. A cute, “cool” hedgehog is a good ambassador for Sega’s youth-oriented brand. For example, Sonic is blue because Sega’s brand is blue he’s an animal because it’s easier to be politically correct if your mascot is a colorful animal. ![]() In retrospect the pair said that the design of Sonic was freighted with concerns about what a "mascot" for Sega should be. “We wanted a level of familiarity, and even comfort.the point was to make it into a character that feels familiar.” “In creating this character, we didn’t want it to be too foreign or too pronounced,” added Oshima. They focused on two big points: the big, connected eyes and the spiky blue skin. While designing the character that became Sonic, Oshima said the idea was to make something striking that could also be drawn by children. He says he asked himself why that might be, and eventually settled on the answer that lots of people chose the hedgehog because it was cute and “transcends race and gender and things like that.” So he brought the sketches back and decided to pitch the hedgehog as the game's mascot. “The second was Eggman, and the third was the dog.” “The result was, the hedgehog was most popular people pointed at it and really liked it,” said Oshima. The story of how the Sonic team settled on a hedgehog is a bit wild. Oshima says he had planned a trip to New York while the afore-mentioned character discussion was happening internally knowing that the team wanted to see examples of characters along these lines, he sketched them on boards in Central Park and started showing random passersby, gauging their reactions. ![]() It wasn’t the only idea, of course - they also considered making Sonic an armadillo, a porcupine, a dog, and a surly old guy with a mustache (this last idea eventually made its way into the character design of Eggman Dr. The answer? “It’s a character you can imagine dealing damage by curling up like a ball and rolling around.” “The question is: why a hedgehog, then?” said Yasuhara. Original game designer Hirokazu Yasuhara (who now works for Unity in Japan) joined original character designer Naoto Oshima (a VP and cofounder at Arzest) onstage to talk about what it was like to try and create a memorable character for Sega in the '90s. ![]()
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