There was a time when Sonic was a boy with blue hair lost in a world besieged by nightmares and with enemies as simple as one shaped like a hand and another shaped like a stone. But the most curious thing about all that was not only in its particular origin, but in what the Americans on the other side of the pond would have wanted it to be.
The character of Sonic seemed so bad to them that the only viable solution they saw was to turn to an example that touched them much more closely: a cartoon raisin made of plasticine capable of scaring fear. As you know, Sonic ended up being what we know today, but this is one of those stories that is worth remembering.
The origin of Sonic
In 1991, Sonic the Hedgehog It arrived on the Sega Megadrive to become its launch game, first in the United States in June, and then in Europe and Japan a month later. The fact of the launch in North American territory before in Japan is key to this story, but first let’s stop a little on what happened previously.
Just two years before that happened, Sonic creator Naoto Ohshima was working on concept art for a project called Twin Stars. In it, two twin brothers who lived in a dream world had to fight a nightmare monster.
Although the project ended up being canceled to be transformed into something else, from that idea were born the tropical worlds, loops and speed that would later shape Sonic. When Ohshima was tasked with working on something different, he took advantage of what he had learned and created to shape that new game.
After some iterations in which the blue-haired character would go from transforming into a friendly rabbit to the hedgehog that we all know, Sonic reached his final design and, to inform Sega America Regarding the plans of the Japanese with their new character, they sent them some first sketches that, well, let’s say that they were not their favorite.
Sonic’s design was unsalvageable
The person in charge of showing the Americans what the design of their new mascot would be was Mark Cernyarchitect of the latest PlayStation, but to the surprise of what would end up being Sony’s genius, the design I didn’t like it at all and, although they ended up choosing the hedgehog instead of Eggman in a contest about the new mascot because he was “the least bad of the two”, they did not intend for it to remain that way.
“When I asked about the design they told me that it was unsalvageable, that the character design was so bad that there were no comments that could help turn it into something salvageable.
What I heard was that they were planning to launch a project to educate Sega Japan on what a good character should be like. They were inspired – or wanted to add to the project – by Will Vinton, who among other things had become famous for creating the California Risins advertisement.
Cerny also explains in the book SEGA Master System: A Visual Compendium that, despite the obvious anger of the Americans, that proposal ended up going nowhere. Sega Japan continued to do its thing and the game ended up coming out with a Sonic that proved to be a real hit and a merchandising machine.
Its success was notably helped by the aggressive price drop of Megadrive after two months on the market. It catapulted the sales of the console and the popularity of the hedgehog, thus becoming the official mascot of the brand throughout the globe and silencing several mouths along the way from those responsible for Sega America.
In iGamesNews | This is the weirdest origin story for a video game character I’ve found. As expected, it’s from Sonic
