![]() ![]() The story has begun taking shape and some early in-game levels were created to test the physics. It’s summer 2005 and production is moving forward with Sonic 2006, the next big presentation will be at Tokyo Game Show (TGS) in September and the team is working hard to make things presentable in time. This is where the development of Sonic 2006 goes south. The team now had a set standard to aim for and it was clear they would have to present live gameplay sooner rather than later. So after a successful E3 it was time to get back to work. It was a powerful demonstration and to this date it’s often brought up as an example of what a lot of fans wishes modern Sonic games were like. It drops in several more robots that gun down Sonic in a surprisingly brutal sequence before Sonic leaps up from the ground, turns into Super Sonic and rams into the crowd of robots ending the demo. Here is where another asset that would later appear in the final game appears, the newly redesigned Egg Carrier. This would later be reused in the final game as Tails’ attack, for reasons unknown.Īfter the first person section, various robots drop in and Sonic leaps onto them before outrunning their fire and bouncing out of the temple onto a large open grass field. In here, depending on the presentation, Sonic would either look around in first person mode, or SEGA would demonstrate the footage being real time by tossing out boxes of rings into the room. In the video, which surfaced online shortly after E3, we see Sonic running through a thick forest and leaping out over a large green field before entering a small temple-like structure which would later be reused in the level Kingdom Valley in the final game. The demonstration was said to be presented in real time and and the general buzz from press in May 2005 was positive. Since the game was very early in production there was no feasible way to have a gameplay demonstration ready for E3, so the team put together a quick tech demo showing the visual style and general tone they’re going for with the next Sonic title. Work on the project begins in early 2005 and it doesn’t take long before SEGA demands to have a presentation behind closed doors for press of their new game at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) of that year. It was decided that this would indeed be the direction the game would head in and the ball was finally moving. When Amaike learned that the team wanted to use a more realistic world design than previous games he remembered the project his old team had wanted to create, and suggested that the player should be able to manipulate and play around with physics at will. Amaike also joined the team as a character artist, tasked to come up with new characters for the title. The team grew for the next couple of months with Yojiro Ogawa being set to direct the title and series co-created Yuji Naka once again taking the seat as producer. For this new project however, Nakamura was going to take on a major role, as he was assigned to be Chief Game Designer on this grand new project. Nakamura‘s biggest role in development up to this point was having directed the Dreamcast hit Samba De Amigo, though he did have past experience with Sonic games, having worked on Sonic R, both Sonic Adventure games as well as the recently released Sonic Heroes. The Havok engine was already in consideration by the team, due to having shown great promise in earlier games and tech demonstrations around the time.īut as the fourth quarter of 2004 came around, Shun Nakamura got a phone call about how SEGA was forming a new team to start working on a game for Sonic’s 15th anniversary in 2006. ![]() The idea was to have a game set in a realistic world where the player would be playing around with physics to manipulate the world and solve puzzles. Yoshinari Amaike, whose latest work had been designing enemies in Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg was part of a small development team at SEGA that had come up with a new game concept. Our story begins long before Sonic 2006 was a thing at an unspecific date somewhere before fall 2004. Get ready, because this is one really weird and long answer. But one question keep on popping up whenever anybody gets their hands on the game just how did SEGA, a professional AAA publisher and developer, allow this to happen? Even SEGA themselves have recently made easter eggs bashing the existence of Sonic 2006. With its unpolished gameplay, ridiculous glitches, awful writing and disappointing visuals there’s not much that wasn’t laughable about the final product SEGA put out for the 15th anniversary of its own company mascot. By now there shouldn’t be a single video game enthusiast that doesn’t know about the infamous SONIC THE HEDGEHOG released in 2006 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, commonly referred to as Sonic 2006.
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