Sonic Adventure/Development

History behind the Redesign

Hello, I was thinking someone could've seen the Sega Forever discord and see what I've posted there to elaborate on the redesign part of Sonic Adventure, but alas, no one wanted to edit the page themselves, so I'm now suggesting this edit myself. There's a lot to ellaborate on but I first want to show what this section currently looks like:

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Along with the idea of making a larger emphasis on story and creating more realistic worlds for Sonic to explore, it was decided that, to truly make this shine out on the market and showcase that it wasn't just a new Sonic game, but a kind of game that had yet to hit the market, it was decided that the principle cast would be redesigned, marking the start of a new era. Yuji Uekawa, who had previously created the title character of Ristar and worked on Flickes' Island and Sonic R, was recruited to redraw characters that had imprinted into the minds of numerous people in the 90's. Such a task was one Uekawa did not take lightly.

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While all of this is technically true, there was a domino effect going on behind the scenes that resulted in this redesign.

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No redesign was initially planned for Sonic Adventure.

Kazuyuki Hoshino talked with artist Satoshi Okano about music and street culture in those days and when Sonic Jam came around, he asked Mr. Okano if he could design artwork for Sega Saturn Magazines to promote Sonic Jam.

The artwork can also be seen in Sonic Jam itself right here and on the front page of Sega Saturn Magazine 1997 07/04 Vol. 22 (ignore the text on that page, we know now that Satoshi Okano made this illustration and plenty of people just associate Yuji Uekawa with this artstyle).

A revised version made for free advertising cards removed the extra detail on Sonic's shoes.

That revised version exists because Yuji Naka asked Mr. Okano to not give Sonic such a strange design and to control himself a bit.

The artwork for Sega Saturn Magazine became pretty popular amongst people at Sega.

The artwork likely influenced Yuji Naka and Kazuyuki Hoshino to create and lead an internal design competition for who could make an even better Sonic design for Project Sonic. We know that Satoshi Okano, Yuji Uekawa, Naoto Ohshima and likely Takumi Miyake (I'd still like see a source for the last claim...) were competing in it.

These artists came up with four different designs for Sonic, seen in this tweet.

Ultimately Yuji Uekawa's design won the internal design contest, but Satoshi Okano helped draw a lot of Sonic Adventure's (1998) artwork, and all of Sonic 3D Blast's (1999) Japanese character artwork anyways. (Plenty of Satoshi Okano's tweets show what artwork he has drawn, but I think Sonic Retro hasn't updated the artwork page to reflect those claims...?)

I'd like to see the page include this information somehow, but I'm not good at writing Wikipedia-quality level of articles... --AnotherBlob (talk) 06:48, 24 September 2023 (EDT)