Making a Sonic Team fan, part 1...

Hello friends, and visitors! I hope the year is going well for you. I’ve been hard at work at my actual job. I’ve also been trying to make time for art. I’ve been stuck thinking about what to write about on the blog. Then it came to me. I could write a little bit about one of my favorite game series, and share some art at the same time! The thing about the games I want to talk about is that it also launched one of my favorite film franchises.

The Sonic the Hedgehog movies by Paramount have been great fun. I’m not going to lie however, I had zero faith in them when the trailer for the first movie dropped in 2019. Like many people the reaction to Ugly Sonic was harsh. Thankfully the studio listened to the outcry, pushed the release date back, and made drastic changes to the design of Sonic. It was one of the rare cases where the most vocal fans helped make sure that Hollywood would be kinder to the source material. By taking on writers, and animators familiar with the character the producers managed to create box office hits back-to-back-to-back. Each film in the trilogy had taken elements from the actual games by Sega, and managed to capture the emotional beats of all the main players. I really appreciated the attention to detail in each film. I know a purist might wish that the movies were entirely animated, and not set on Earth, but will all things considered the studios did very well making the characters accessible to the public.

The other thing that I loved about the films was that I was able to bond with my kid over them. We were both big fans of the Sonic series. We must have owned just about every release across every platform, including many LCD games. My love for the character, and the franchise came with the debut of the very first game on the Sega Genesis way back in 1991. My kid’s first game was Sonic Adventure DX on the Nintendo GameCube in 2003. It seemed surreal that I had been a fan for 35 years, and my kid for more than 20. Being able to share a common love of a character had really brought us closer together. It made me appreciate that of all the movies we’d seen as a family, it was a video game movie that meant the most to us. It also made me think about how much I really enjoyed the games by the developers at Sonic Team working at Sega.

Like many of you I’ve had the conversation of favorite games with my family, and friends over the years. My brothers, and I grew up with the major consoles, going all the way back to the Atari 2600 circa 1980. We loved every console, and cherished every game we played. Long ago I had a thought experiment. If I were stuck on a deserted island, and could only bring one video game with me to play forever then which one would it be? Was it possible to rank them in order? I leaned to a very specific company, and very specific team. I published my list in 2006 on the old 1UP site. Sega was responsible for six of my top 20 favorite games of all-time. Of those games three of them were produced by Sonic Team. When I revised that list in 2023 the number of games from Sega went up to eight out of 20.

I ranked many Sega games high on the list my favorite game of all time was NiGHTS into dreams… which was from Sonic Team. I took my gaming seriously. I bought the original Xbox back in 2002 for the second title on my list Jet Set Radio Future. The Jet Set Radio series was by the Smilebit, and Hitmaker teams at Sega. The original Sonic the Hedgehog was revolutionary, and the even better Sonic the Hedgehog 2 ended up as #3 on my list. The third Sonic Team game that I ranked was Burning Rangers in the sixth spot.

NiGHTS, Sonic, and the Burning Rangers were all radically different ideas that were each executed perfectly. The thing about the Sonic Team was that they were fantastic at creating experiences in different genres. It seemed that there was nothing that the senior members couldn’t do. The initial team was formed in 1990 from members of Sega's Consumer Development division aka the console people. This was opposed to people like Yu Suzuki and the AM groups working on arcade games. Sonic Team included programmer Yuji Naka, artist Naoto Ohshima, and level designer Hirokazu Yasuhara.

Music for the first two Sonic games came from composer Masato “Masa” Nakamura from the Japanese pop group Dreams Come True. Aside from the game play it was the music that really appealed to me in the early games. In fact after I beat the very first title I made it my mission to try and track down more music from his band. Thankfully the Los Angeles Metro Blue Line had also opened in 1990. It gave people from Long Beach a chance to travel to downtown LA for just over a dollar. When we were in high school my brothers, and friends would go at least once a month as a group to check out the sights. We discovered Little Tokyo, and made many repeat visits. We would rent Dragon Ball tapes just as they were released in Japan, collected toys, CD’s, and import games. All of the things that current generations take for granted used to be a series of adventures for us. One of the great things of the old Yaohan Plaza shopping complex in Downtown LA were the arcades. The building was multiple stories. There was an arcade featuring the latest games from Japan, and even a bowling alley with its own arcade as well. Sadly the majority of the shops closed down, and it was sold to a Korean conglomerate about a decade after we started visiting it.

It was the “Arcade Japan” where I saw, and got a chance to play one of the rarest Sonic the Hedgehog games ever made. Waku Waku Sonic Patrol Car was a kiddie ride released in 1991, the same year that the console game debuted. I managed to cram my 6’ 7”, 320 lbs frame into the cabinet so I could play it. My brothers couldn’t believe that I managed to squeeze myself into the cabinet, but at the same time they knew how passionate I was about the series. While going into the various bookstores in Little Tokyo I finally found the music from Dreams Come True. I would buy at least one CD each trip, and ended up collecting every album, and almost every single from the group as well. It was also where I picked up a number of Capcom, and Sega games CDs which I still have in my collection.

    

Each Zone in the Sonic titles had their own unique song. They were all catchy tunes. Little did I know that the best melodies would be featured in an album. The Star Light Zone song to me was the best. It framed the chill vibe of the stage, the groundbreaking parallax-scrolling stars in the background, and its unique fight against Dr. Eggman. I had just graduated high school, and was attending college when I finally heard the song it was based on. I remember I was walking to the bus stop, listening to my portable CD player when the familiar melody popped up. I lost my mind hearing the song with lyrics! 薬指の決心 = Kusuriyubi no kesshin = Determination of the ring finger from the album Million Kisses was the melody that Masa had composed for Sonic Team months before it appeared on the album.

I would also find out that the song Sweet, Sweet, Sweet aka Sweet Dreams from the album The Swinging Star was the inspiration for the ending song from Sonic the Hedgehog 2. For decades after I held the space-inspired stage from the original game, and the song in the highest of regards. While I enjoyed Sonic Adventure, and many other 2D and 3D games in the series, I felt that none of the releases ever captured the wonder of the Star Light Zone. That was at least until 2010 when Sonic Colors was released. The game took place on different planets all over the cosmos, but there was one section in particular that recaptured the magic for me.

The Starlight Carnival, specifically Act 1 was arguably the greatest Sonic zone set in space. It was a parade, and fireworks show set in deep space. It was made up of hundreds of gigantic spaceships covered in lights, lasers, and glowing floats. It was like a cosmic version of the Disneyland’s Main Street Electrical Parade or Walt Disney World’s SpectroMagic for the people on the East Coast. Except that this parade went on for miles, and featured ships the size of skyscrapers. It was a spectacle as Sonic ran on a track made of energy, with countless ships as far as the eye could see, and even hundreds more popping in out of hyperspace. As a space nerd I was absolutely living for it.

 

The game play, and music featured in the Sonic Team games made me a lifelong fan. It wasn’t the only thing that kept me coming back. As an artist I couldn’t get enough of the world building that the studio was doing. It greatly influenced my work. I’m going to talk about that in the next blog. Did you have a favorite Sonic Team game? Did you like the movies, or music associated with the Sonic franchise? I’d like to hear about it in the comments section. As always if you enjoyed this blog, and would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!