Yojiro Ogawa discusses Sonic GemsDespite being a veterinary Sega designer, Yojiro Ogawa has never had much of a public presence. So it is somewhat surprising that Sega Direct provided him with a regular column to promote the release of Sonic Gems Collection, a feat that even Naka and Iizukia have failed to manage.
The column consists of 7 parts. The final instalment was published today and includes comments from the director, Hisatoku Yamada* together with photographs of the newly created content. Many of these photographs have been obscured to prevent revealing the secret content, but the columns still provide new details on the retro collection.
The earlier editions focus on the production of the Sonic Gems Collection T-Shirt. It seems that Ogawa’s team considered many designs for the exclusive item of merchandise before settling for the slightly cryptic ‘Zone 2 Act 2’ motif.
The rejected designs featured artwork of Metal Sonic, the Flicky and Ricky sprites from the original Mega Drive games and the American renditions of Sonic, Tails and Eggman.
The chosen ‘Zone 2 Act 2’ motif refers to the underwater sections of the Chemical Plant Zone. Apparently, none of the members of Sonic Team could navigate this area without losing a few lives.
The later columns discuss the some of the goals Sonic Team hoped to achieve with Gems Collection. Ogawa felt that the collection should have a strong multi-player element, which resulted in the inclusion of titles such as Sonic the Fighters, Sonic R and Streets of Rage.
To assist players in Sonic the Fighters, a special pause menu was created which lists all the attacks of each fighter.
The team were also keen to endow the collection with a sense of rarity and so included a variety of obscure Sonic items in the museum, such as the arcade manuals for Sonic the Fighters, an exclusive remix gallery and photographs of little known arcade-based Sonic systems.
Ogawa is apparently eager to start work on the next Sonic title.*
[*Disclaimer: Information obtained via machine translation and so may be partly inaccurate].
=all kinds of awesome
