Mark Cerny first: Sega-16 scored big again and got a quick moment of his time for an interview. He talks of his days working at Atari and Sega of Japan...and you might've known that SoA wasn't keen on Sonic at first, but not to the degree Cerny recalls!
Sega-16: Do you have any stories from the 8-bit days?
Mark Cerny: Tokyo Disneyland had opened only a few years before, and it was very popular with the younger people at Sega. On one of my many trips there I saw a 3D movie called Captain EO, starring Michael Jackson… on the way out I was thinking, can we do 3D in games? So I decided to talk Sega into making a liquid crystal shutter peripheral for the Master System. Actually, it was pretty easy, Sega was looking any ammunition they could use in the fight against Nintendo, and pretty soon a prototype landed on my desk.
The 3D glasses were a moderately successful peripheral, we made about six games for it, but the most interesting story has to do with a game that didn't get made. The prototype arrived in our office before a week-long holiday. I built a quick ball and paddle demo for it and took off. While I was gone, Yuji Naka built a 3D graphics engine – for the Master System! – and constructed a tunnel chase demo. He's an amazing programmer, no doubt about it. However, the Master System was so weak that the 3D window was only two inches on a side, and the demo sadly never became a game.
Sega-16: The original Sonic the Hedgehog changed the landscape for Sega. Were you involved in its development?
Mark Cerny: No, I moved back to the states just as the team started work on it, and I didn't get involved in the Sonic franchise until Sonic 2. But I did visit Japan frequently during its development, so I did get to see it at various stages of completion.
At one point when I visited Sega headquarters, Naoto Ohshima – the Sonic Team character artist – showed me some sketches of potential player characters for the game. He asked me what I, as an American, thought of the characters. There were a number of them, including an early Sonic, Robotnik, and a character with a heavy Simpsons influence. I believe that he was really trying to get my opinion of Sonic, and that the other characters were decoys.
My feeling was "well, I'm just a random American, let's ask the Sega of America marketing people," as I was under the impression that they should have a much better feeling of what would or would not appeal to the U.S. market than I would. So I made some color copies, attached a note saying that this was the work of the Tokyo headquarters' "top team," and could they please give some feedback.
A month or two had passed, and no feedback had arrived from Sega of America's marketing group, so I asked if they had any comments for the team. I heard, I kid you not, that the characters were "unsalvageable," that this was a "disaster," and that "procedures would be put in place to make sure that this sort of thing would never happen again." These "procedures" included a proposed "top ten list of dos and don'ts" to follow when making products for the American market. Additionally, I was told that the marketing group would be contacting a known character designer (I won't reveal the name but it made me cringe at the time) to make a character that showed exactly what the American market needed. Needless to say, this character designer would have been totally inappropriate for the Japanese market. Not that great for the American market either, I suspect.
I returned to these conversations a lot after Sonic became an international hit… what could these people have been thinking? In the end, I suppose I feel that Sonic the Hedgehog was a good enough character, like Mario or Crash Bandicoot, that when coupled with an extraordinary game could really stick in people's minds, but you might have to see and play the game to appreciate that.
Actually, this was not the last interaction with marketing that left me shaking my head. In September 1991, four months after Sonic the Hedgehog's release in North America, I'd managed to reunite two of the three key Sonic Team members (Yuji Naka, the Sonic programmer and team leader, and Hirokazu Yasuhara, the designer) at my Sega Technical Institute. They were ready to start work on their next project, and so I asked marketing the obvious question, "would you like another Sonic?" Bizarrely, the response was, and again I kid you not, "no, it's much too soon." So we found another game to make, and in November, as we were getting started, marketing came back and said "oops, we do need that game and we need it now." So the team lost two months out of an eleven month schedule!
One much smaller Sonic inside story: the character's color was changed just prior to release. Sonic had been a lighter blue, but he was very hard to see against the ocean backgrounds, so his color was darkened at the last moment.
Nintendo Power ran two-page piece on the development history of Sonic 1. It's a suprisingly competent piece - they go into a great deal of detail, mentioning the original "play as a rabbit and pick up stuff" idea, Naka's apparent breakthrough with the speed concept, exactly how they wanted to set him apart from Mario and every other goofy gaming icon of the late 80's and early 90's...the works. And without the slightest hint of bias too, except for the expectant brief ad-lib towards Sonic on the Wii and Sonic Genesis. What's more is they recieved some comments about how it all came together direct from all of the key players in its' development save Oshima. (Odd, that...he was the producer for Yoshi's Island 2.)Sega-16: The Sega Technical Institute was originally founded to beef up Sega's game development in the U.S. , and though many potential franchises were developed, Sega seemed to have little interest in making sequels to great games like Comix Zone and Greendog. Why was that?
Mark Cerny: After setting up the Sega Technical Institute, I left just as Sonic 2 was finishing up, so I wasn't there for Comix Zone and Greendog. I was rooting for Peter Morawiec as I left, though, even though he'd never made games before he seemed to be someone with exceptional talent. For those not familiar with him, his later career after Comix Zone includes Vigilante 8 and True Crime: Streets of LA.
As for why Sega probably didn't make sequels, the question is always who is going to create them? It isn't as if there are hugely talented game creators sitting around, waiting to make the next game in your series. Frankly, if they're any good, they are busy working on their own series!
Another reason is that the Sega Technical Institute was a very volatile mix of people; given half a chance it kept falling apart at the seams. Part of the initial concept was that we would bring together two groups: fresh Americans who hadn't done much in the way of game development before, and experienced developers from the Japanese headquarters. The Japanese would mentor, the Americans would learn.
This turned out to be a tremendous mistake. The Japanese didn't arrive until the Americans were already in place, as we had huge visa problems. Once they arrived, there were language problems and cultural problems too – I don't want to go into any details but it was unpleasant. Sonic 2 did ship, and the team that created it was half Japanese and half American, but after that everyone said "no more!" Sonic Spinball was done by the American staff, and Sonic 3 and Sonic and Knuckles were done by the Japanese.
Answering Nakayama's call were a character designer named Naoto Oshima and a talented young programmer named Yuji Naka, who had previously collaborated on the Phantasy Star series. The two started braintstorming ideas for the project, but couldn't move forward in earnest until they found a game designer. That's when world events unexpectedly teamed them with Hirokazu Yasuhara. "At the time, I was supposed to go to the United States to establish a new R&D team [at Sega of America] with Mark Cerny," recalls Yasuhara. "But then the first Gulf War started, and my move to the US was postponed for three months. Work was progressing on the [new mascot] game, but Naka and Oshima needed a full-time game designer on the project. They saw that I was free, and looked to me for help designing the game until my departure. So I officially joined the project as a game designer, planning to work on it only until I went to the US. But I ended up staying in Japan for a full year until we were finished with the project." And thus was formed what would eventually become known as "Sonic Team".
"When I first started working on the project, I remember looking at the various games that were out at the time and wishing that they were cooler and that the characters moved faster," says Naka. So the programmer almost single-handedly created a game engine that took full advantage of the Genesis hardware's speedy CPU (a blazing 7.6 MHz). "Naka gave me a demonstration of the game engine that showed a new method of scrolling the background at a very fast speed," recalls Yasuhara. "I then began thinking about how we could create a game using this technology."
One idea was to have a rabbit that could pick up objects with its' ears and throw them at enemies. But the team decided that particular mechanic slowed down the game too much and was too complex. "The concept of speed can be difficult for some gamers," says Naka, "and I didn't want it to be a game only for the really good players."
In addition to his speed, the developers wanted the hedgehog to stand out by way of his personality."[Ours] was the first action-game character to display an 'attitude' towards the player,", notes Yasuhara. "It meant that [he] was more than a mere cursor for the player." The hedgehog's finger-wagging antics may seem tame by today's standards, but they were pretty edgy compared to the lifeless avatars that populated most games at the time.
All that was left was to give the character a moniker that reflected his unique traits. "After long consideration," recalls Yasuhara, "almost at the end of the project, the name of the hedgehog was decided: Sonic."
To help with the graphic design for the stages, the team brought in Reiko Kodama, who had worked with Naka and Oshima on the Phantasy Star series. "It was still hard to display polygons back then, but the graphics in Sonic the Hedgehog were designed incorporating polygonal style," explains Kodama. "[When designing levels], I drew the whole field using CG-like images. We intentionally created the designs as if they were illustrated artificially with CG tools. To tell you the truth, we drew them bit-by-bit because the software for computer graphics had not been developed much at the time. [Laughs]" As a result, the game's visuals boasted an incredible sense of depth.
(There are some more comments from Nakamura following that, but I suspect they were pulled from an old interview SoA conducted with him last year.)The team was determined to attain that same cutting-edge quality for the game's music. "Instead of the ordinary FM-synthesized video game music [prevalent] at the time, we wanted to use radio-quality music to show off the performance of the new 16-bit hardware," says Yasuhara. So they looked to an up-and-coming Japanese pop star to compose the soundtrack. "When we first started the project, we didn't plan on using a famous composer from outside of Sega," comments Naka. "However, my boss introduced me to Masato Nakamura, who was a member of [the popular Japanese band] Dreams Come True. It was his first time working on a game, but I remember the entire staff being impressed by his sample of music the first time we heard it." For Nakamura, the project's allure stemmed from the passion he saw in the development team. "The thing that really made me want to do the music for Sonic was that everyone at Sega was so intent on the whole, 'This is going to beat out Mario!' feeling," recalls the musician,. "I figured that, sure, i'd do whatever I could to help with that goal."
The rest of what's in there, we either already know or have already heard about it from the horse's mouth. Sorry to crush you all under the weight of so many massive quote boxes here; I would scan the article, except the Scanner to do it with I lack.Though many of the original Sonic Team members have moved on, they all look back fondly on the project that not only changed their careers, but the entire video game industry. "I discovered many things about gaming from that project, and i'm still standing on those experiences today," reflects Yasuhara. "It is a game that I always look back on whenever I choose a way to design a new game. Sonic is always with me."
