[STEAM] "Is this gonna be a Sonic game?": Even Takashi Iizuka wasn't sure about Sonic Pico Park at first, but Sega's learned a lot from its indie collaborators

[Steam 0]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

(Image credit: PlayStation, Xbox,

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, Rockstar) Our

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

special is here to spotlight the biggest games of the year with hands-on impressions, dev access, and more!

For Sonic Team head Takashi Iizuka, seeing the beloved hedgehog and pals take on such a different type of gameplay was something of a shock, but *****'s previous big indie collaboration gave him confidence that it would work out.

"When I first saw the concept and the whole idea, I was kind of like, 'Is this gonna be a Sonic game?'" Iizuka tells me. "Like, 'I don't know how this collab is going to work.' But our experience working with the Sonic Mania team – they were also an indie developer, and they also had these ideas and kind of core beliefs that they wanted to execute on creatively."

While an eight-player co-op game was "something we on the Sonic Team side had never made before," that type of gameplay "was something that the team at Pico Park was really passionate about making." Iizuka did have at least one big suggestion for Tecopark, however: all the Sonic characters should have unique abilities. "It totally breaks the core game design of Pico Park," Iizuka admits, "but the team at Pico Park were really skilled at understanding the request, and then building around it."

Sonic madness meets Sonic Mania

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

(Image credit: *****) ***** has now let indie developers make their own Sonic game multiple times, and it's not alone. We've gotten games like Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, The Rogue Prince of Persia, Cadence of Hyrule, and even the upcoming Castlevania: Belmont's Curse thanks to established publishers being open to allowing other developers to use their IP, and the results have largely been excellent. What's made it possible for these sorts of collaborations to happen in the modern era?

"I can't really speak for the other companies and maybe what they're thinking, but you know, from a ***** perspective, we do realize that making our big titles, it takes a lot of time, a lot of money," Iizuka explains. "It's a huge investment of, you know, the staff and the resources that we have, and then once you've invested all that time and energy into something, you really need to sell a lot of units in order to survive in the industry."

Indie developers, meanwhile, "have an idea, and they'll very quickly create that idea – that game experience – and then they'll continue moving forward and making more stuff. That's one thing that larger companies really can learn from the indie development scene – just how quickly they can take an idea, capture that, and put that into a game experience. It's really stimulating working with those indie developers." Iizuka believes this is a

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, and that AAA game studios should follow suit.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

(Image credit: Paramount) Partnering with indie studios also gives companies like ***** a chance to work with the very people whose love of video games was sparked by their characters. "I grew up in a household where we had a Super Famicom, but I was asking for a Mega Drive," Shimazu says. "My brother wanted a PlayStation, and I wanted to play Virtua Fighter. So I've always been that ***** fan at heart."

Key info Developer: Tecopark, *****
Platforms: PC, others TBA
Release date: TBA

Of course, Shimazu was a Sonic fan, too, and has watched the character grow from a platformer protagonist to a multimedia mascot just like many of us have. "It was this really cool, unique character that I got to play with, and I really appreciated and enjoyed that time with the games," he says. "But when we look historically at what Sonic has been and where Sonic is going – Sonic's in movies, Sonic's in lots of different media. All these different ways of presenting Sonic to lots of people, I think, has been one of those ways to help Sonic survive."

Sonic's survival wasn't always assured. A decade ago,

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

. But Iizuka thanks the fans for keeping the series alive even now, 35 years later – not to mention making sure that ***** stays on the right path.

"I'm sure you guys remember the Sonic 1 movie trailer that went out there. The fans really said, 'We don't like this, and we want things changed.' The teams listened to that, and they changed the design of Sonic for the movie. We're always constantly listening to the fans when we're thinking about the next game we want to make. Because the fans are there and they have been supporting us so much, we want to take the time – for the past 35 years – and really listen to what they want and deliver something that they're going to enjoy."

Gotta go fast to our list of the

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

of all time.

[/url]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up