Sorry to bump an old thread, but...
big_smile wrote: Speaking of Tails Doll, at the most recent Summer of Sonic, Kazuyuki Hoshino revealed that he was created by Sonic R's background designer - he was originally intended to be just an obstacle you shoot on the factory stage. I guess they still had this idea in mind when they designed E-102 Gamma's first stage in Sonic Adventure.
When I heard Hoshino say this, I got the impression that he didn't remember who Tails Doll was and was confusing him with the one from Sonic Adventure.
Otherwise his comments don't make much sense, as there are no shooting mechanics in Sonic R and it's unlikely that Final Egg would have been in development during Sonic R's production process.
G.Silver wrote:Otherwise his comments don't make much sense, as there are no shooting mechanics in Sonic R and it's unlikely that Final Egg would have been in development during Sonic R's production process.
Since Sonic Adventure was supposedly in development on the Saturn in 1997 this doesn't seem all that surprising to me. Maybe not "Final Egg" as we know it but some sort of factory stage would have certainly been in consideration from the very beginning. Tails Doll and the other robot characters might not have been in Sonic R's initial planning stages but considering what small amounts of resources each is made up of (do they even animate?) they could have been added pretty easily at the last minute.
G.Silver wrote:So I was just going off what CP said before, I just listened to the interview now and have to agree, he does not seem to be talking about Tails Doll. (Also the guy asking questions asked about Metal Sonic when he clearly meant Metal Knuckles. I guess they're all a little confused!) It still makes a lot of sense that they would have stemmed from the same doll idea (not that they're the same character in the game fiction), and if I were Hoshino looking for something interesting to say in an interview I would definitely have confirmed the connection if it were true (it's interesting to me, anyway!) but it doesn't really seem like that's what he's doing.
It's pretty confusing!
Summer of Sonic 2013 Q&A
Sonic Boom 2013 Q&A
The Sonic Boom Q&A was a bit of a loud and obnoxious clusterfuck, but surely in the Summer of Sonic Q&A he would have heard "Sonic R" and "Sega Saturn". To make things more bewildering, in the Sonic Boom Q&A he mentions Sonic Adventure directly. In both he mentions that the Tails Doll creator is a background artist on Sonic Lost World.
The connective tissue to all this appears to be
Yoshitaka Miura. According to that Sonic Channel interview he joined Sega in
1997 as a Sonic Adventure background artist. Sonic Adventure does indeed
credit him as a Field artist.
In Sonic Lost World
Miura gets the top billing of all the Field Artists, which is consistent with Hoshino's description of the Tails Doll designer being Lost World's "lead" background artist.
Looping this back around to Sonic R, in the Saturn version Yuji Uekawa is credited as Character Designer. But
Yoshitake Miura is given a Special Thanks credit.
In the PC release of Sonic R,
both Yuji Uekawa AND Yoshitaki Miura are credited as Character Designers.
Sonic R was released 18 November 1997, and according to Jon Burton
took six months from start to finish to turn their F1 prototype into a Sonic game.
Putting all these pieces together, the most logical explanation seems to be that Miura joined Sega to work on Sonic Adventure in 1997, designed a Tails Doll as a shootable object for Gamma, and somehow the idea wound up getting put into the hastily developed Sonic R as a playable character.