Shadow the Hedgehog (game)/Development

Shadow the Hedgehog has gone through several changes over its development process. The following details several of these things.

Development Process

Shadow the Hedgehog was developed by Sega Studio USA, the former United States division of Sega's Sonic Team, and published by Sega. The game and its tagline ("Hero or villain? You decide.") were revealed at the March 2005 inauguration of Sonic the Hedgehog into the Walk of Game. The game was formally announced by Sega on March 23.

Sonic Team's Takashi Iizuka, who had worked on the Sonic the Hedgehog series since 1993, targeted a younger audience with previous games, and wanted to target an older audience with Shadow the Hedgehog.[1] The game's development team wanted to make a game featuring Shadow to resolve plot mysteries that began with the character's introduction in Sonic Adventure 2.[2] The team felt that Shadow's design—inspired by films such as Underworld, Constantine, and the Terminator series—would make the story darker and allow for elements, such as vehicles and weapons, otherwise considered inappropriate for a Sonic game.[3] Sonic Team's Yuji Naka stated in an interview with GameSpy that he wanted to use Shadow as the game's main character due to his popularity among fans and being the best fit for a "gun action" game.[4] The game contains profanities—instances of damn and hell spoken by Shadow and other characters such as Espio and the president. Profanity and the usage of guns, firsts for the series, generated some pre-release controversy.

Lost tracks

In this game, a track was removed for due to copyright and licensing reasons. The song was "Who I Am" by Magna-Fi, the band who made "All Hail Shadow". Another song, "Broken" by Sins of a Divine Mother, was desired by Jun Senoue to be used in the game. However, after being unable to contact the band's lead singer Wylie B. to discuss licensing, the song was dropped in favor of "Chosen One", written and performed by the band A2 (which features members from the latter band.) [5]

Censorship

Due to the mildly violent nature of the game, the ESRB rating was, for a time, in question. The official ESRB website originally had the game rated as T, along with GameSpot, but the official site listed E-10+. The T rating was seemingly further evidenced, however, by the fact that, at trade shows where Sega showed off the game, they asked only those 13 and older to play the title. Early builds of the game even had mild swearing in them, and the game does include two mildly offensive words (damn and hell). For the English Version of the game, Sega took out the human's blood, changed the color of alien blood from red to green, edited the word 'piss' and put 'tick' instead (Sonic says this), and censored the scene when a GUN soldier shoots Maria, cutting out as Maria is shot and falls to the ground. Regardless, the ESRB website later updated the rating to E-10+, thus making it unanimous. The following images show two examples of the censorship:

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  Text was changed from "Just what the hell was that all about" to "What was that about".

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  Reddish blood was changed to green.