This was, of course, originally a SEGA arcade game. I think the shortlist was well over 100 characters! That wasn’t just for racers, but also cameo characters, achievement images, etc.įirst, it had a legal pass – did SEGA actually own the characters? For some of the older characters on our original list, there wasn’t always a straightforward answer… Lycett: Originally, we created a list of characters we wanted to consider. MV: How did character selection go? Were you given a list of characters SEGA wanted to have represented, or did you have an idea beforehand of who you wanted and ran it by SEGA? Everyone got cars (or bikes!), but of course that multi-vehicle play sat at the back of our minds before eventually blossoming into Racing Transformed… “Race, yo? Naw, gotta work on my tan, bro!” (via Game on Grafix) Flying characters had a huge advantage, as they could cut corners with no penalty, on foot characters were too easily smashed out of the road by vehicles, and as we developed a car for Amy, we put in that classic OutRun style drifting and it was too good a mechanic to ignore. We ended up going back to more traditional vehicles as when we prototyped it, it kind of worked, but it was really unbalanced. So that was there and key from the start. There already, you can see we were mining ideas from the source games for not only characters, but their vehicles and forms of locomotion. Originally the plan was to have a mixture of methods of transport, so Sonic would be on foot, Beat would be on skates, Tails would be in a plane, and then we got really weird with Gilius Thunderhead riding a Chicken Leg enemy from Golden Axe! In addition, you’ll note I said racing game, not driving game. But we wanted to have a lot of diversity in terms of characters and themes and for that we wanted to be able to explore the wider possibilities other IPs offered. Sonic is clearly an important franchise for SEGA, and for me at least, should always be represented. Lycett: It was always going to be across all SEGA properties. MV: Did it begin as SEGA All-Stars, or was it going to be Sonic? Take what we’d learned from OutRun and apply a whole set of SEGA worlds and characters on top! “Fast as fast can be, you’ll never catch me!” (via Sonic News Network) Helped to no end by the fact we were (and still are!) SEGA fans.Īs soon as we finished SEGA Superstars Tennis, we sat down and agreed with SEGA to do a racing game next. Take the core gameplay of Virtua Tennis mixed with blue skies and sunshine, and we’d have something that would be accessible to all ages. We’d pick from SEGA’s vast back catalogue for characters and stages and we’d try and be authentic to the original IP whilst making a game that felt very SEGA. Here the basis of both Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing and Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed was laid. The idea was floated, SEGA agreed and so SEGA Superstars Tennis was born as a result! Towards the end of VT3, we’d got a big head cheat in and we had the sudden realization that Sonic could be a playable character with a little work… That lead in turn to Virtua Tennis World Tour, OutRun 2006, and then Virtua Tennis 3. Sumo had worked with SEGA since our conversion of OutRun 2. Lycett: To understand this, first a little background. Mega Visions: How did this project begin? Was it SEGA’s idea, or Sumo’s? The following has been lightly edited for clarity/formatting. 23, 2020 marked the 10th anniversary of the release of Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing for the Xbox 360, Wii, Nintendo DS, PlayStation 3, Windows (via Steam), OnLive, Mac, iOS, Android, Blackberry, Java ME, your mother’s coffee machine, your grandfather’s pacemaker, and even arcades! (Okay, only two of those aren’t true - we’ll leave you to figure out which ones.)įor the occasion, we reached out to Steve Lycett, Executive Producer at Sumo Digital for the SEGA All-Stars series, to look back in-depth at how the game came to be.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |