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 Takumi Miyake 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)

That's a juicy lot of information we need to document right there. Don't worry if you think you're not good at writing pages - you could make an effort to add these in just so they're all there, and either me or someone else could tidy it up a bit to make it look more presentable. --BSonirachi (talk) 11:41, 24 September 2023 (EDT)

I wrote a very summarized version of all that info for the page, but sensibly AnotherBlob rewrote my one to be more in depth, then rewrote it again with my feedback. Well, I've added that text to the page, but it causes some minor problems for the rest of the page. Namely, as I moved it to its own Character design section, there's a big gap on the side where the images (some of which are kinda random) were added to fill space. --Nicolaas Hamman (talk) 6:43, 24 September 2023 (GMT+2)

There may be more examples of this transition in the 1998 arcade version of Spikeout. Also, this image was initially found alongside some photos of Sonic Carnival referring to its earlier years (96-99), but wasn't specified further. Figured this might be up your alley :) - CartridgeCulture (talk) 17:22, 24 September 2023 (EDT)

Hi, I was thinking of mentioning Spikeout, but then I was also thinking "Well, the only thing Spikeout did was reuse Naoto Ohshima's design submission."... But speaking of Naoot Ohshima's design, I was thinking of including this other artwork by Naoto Ohshima somehow, but I have no idea how I'd include that without knowing the context when or where it was released, or if it's really even that useful to document in this article if this article is more so supposed to be "the transition of Classic to Modern" summed up in text form. As for the Sonic Carnival sign, I kind of always assumed this is Sonic Adventure 2 artwork, maybe that's a sign from when Sonic Adventure 2 released or was being developed instead? I wish that photo had a definitive timestamp... Another thing I'd want to point out is that the archived tweet link on the article doesn't work for me (https://web.archive.org/web/20220706005429/https://twitter.com/MainJPW/status/1544211122965864449). I've heard that it broke some time ago. Maybe the linked tweet can be archived a different way? --AnotherBlob (talk) 03:16, 25 September 2023 (EDT)

Small update, I glossed over that Tracker_TD pointed out that the Uekawa submission was also included in Spikeout, but with green eyes... Hm, I wonder how that could be implemented. --AnotherBlob (talk) 03:20, 25 September 2023 (EDT)

Don't know why that Wayback link isn't working, the tweet IS there. Regardless: https://archive.ph/7FlgB (archive.today), https://ghostarchive.org/archive/WAq38 (Ghost Archive) JaxTH (talk) 07:00, 25 September 2023 (EDT)

Nicolaas Hamman has replaced the old archive link that didn't work (the Amy part) with 3 seperate new archive links, btw. Though regardless, thank you for trying to help us. I find Sonic Retro a pretty scary place, since I always use it to find stuff like artwork in the highest resolution, and also see a lot of important people on here, I do not want to upset anyone here. Seeing people help essentially a newbie make some pretty drastic changes to a pretty important page on this website makes it a lot less scary. :) --AnotherBlob (talk) 09:28, 25 September 2023 (EDT)