Metal naturally fit into our key visual concept for Sonic CD as well, and from the first moment that I imagined his red iris set against the darkness of his black eyes, I knew he would become a character with real, lasting appeal.Īs a result, Metal Sonic continues to appear in the newer Sonic games, and many people in Europe and America enjoy drawing fan art of him, for which I’m very grateful. When I first heard the words “Sonic’s Arch-rival” and “Sonic’s Doppelganger” in the design notes, an image for that character’s design immediately came to me, in almost complete form. As mentioned, Sonic’s 3D sprite in the intro was based on these 3D sculptures crafted by Taku Makino.

Sonic CD’s title screen, as seen in the 2011 port. I think it was a success, in the way it clearly felt different from the previous Sonic games. To provide contrast and highlight Sonic himself, we made the emblem behind him look metallic, to provide an overall impression of “CG”.

To create that image of Sonic turning to face you, we used a polaroid camera to take pictures of a Sonic figurine, scanned them, and used that as our base to create the animation. At the time, “CG” meant sparkling, sheen metallic surfaces that immediately jumped out at you and yelled, “THIS IS CG!”, and frankly, I thought that aesthetic was the height of cool.Īs Ohshima and I gathered up more and more CG reference materials, our excitement grew, manifesting in that title screen for Sonic CD-our first foray. Of course, the computing power and hardware of that era was pretty paltry compared with today, so we were never going to be able to create something that matched those ambitions, nor was anyone expecting that from us. There was a strategic side to it, too: this game would be for the brand new Mega CD, so we wanted to include new ideas distinct from the previous Sonic games. “whoa…! amazing, so this is a computer?!”-yeah, I was pretty green, and I had stars in my eyes for anything “high tech”.

When I joined Sega, it was my first chance to work with a Mac. In terms of the graphics, our biggest theme for Sonic CD was “CG”.

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