Today I was made aware of the fact that a group of Sonic fans got together and crafted a truly gigantic Google Doc about the visual design of Sonic the Hedgehog.
How to render his body, what shape his quills should be, visual design inspirations and how they influenced the original Sonic design 35 years ago. Pages and pages and pages of "No, not like that, do it like this."
By itself, this is fine. This is building character design and art direction skills. If you want to turn being an artist into a career, these are the kinds of things that you need to think about. No foul. And like I said above, Sega micromanages all kinds of weird elements of Sonic's visual design, so it's natural to analyze why that is and try to find an answer. This is all normal stuff.
But this document was written in Japanese.
Most of the Sonic fans contributing to this document probably do not speak Japanese (I assume).
That's because, yes, you guessed it: they genuinely expect somebody from Sega of Japan to read this document and take it to heart. They are even tagging Morio Kishimoto on social media about it.
I want to paint a picture for you.
Imagine an office. Something like 200 people work there. You can imagine a sea of cubicles. You can hear phones ringing. Keyboards tapping away. Everybody is doing something, even if it's taking a breather at the water cooler. Classic office environment.
Some 22 year old kid strolls in, nobody knows who they are, and from the receptionist desk at the front of the office, suddenly announces: "HEY GUYS, I FIXED IT FOR YOU."
Upon saying this, they drop a 157 page tome. It lands with an audible thud.
And everybody in that office turns to look at this kid like
I also want to tell another, related story, about when I was around 13 years old.
This is when I started to wonder about how video games were made. So I sat down with some friends and we tried to figure out what making a video game looked like. What is a video game? Well, it's levels, it's boss fights, and its characters. So if we come up with those, then somehow that is the shape of a video game.
So we came up with a game called "Sonic: In Your Face" and we sketched out some rough (terrible) ideas for a couple levels and we came up with a new character to join the cast: Eddie the Eagle. I think we might have had some awareness that Sonic was Japanese in origin, and we though maybe having someone blatantly American would add some diversity to the cast. Again, we were 13.
We bundled a lot of this up into a big letter that we sent to Sega. By mail. Physical USPS.
Now, I'm not trying to relate that because our ideas were terrible, that the Google doc I mentioned is also terrible. I'm trying to relate to what happened next:
We got a response from Sega. And that response was, "Thank you, but we do not accept fan submissions."
There was simply too much legal red tape. In truth, nobody on the game development side was even allowed to look at our letter. There were contracts that needed to be signed, vetting, all kinds of complex things to make sure Sega had all the legality settled to protect them from lawsuits, because if they used our ideas without properly crediting and paying us, that could create a big problem for them.
So they just didn't do it. Blanket statement denial. They already had guys who made video games for them, guys who did character design and level design and came up with ideas, and even if they needed more of those, they had different, separate channels for that kind of thing that were not "some kids sent in a letter."
Now, it's 2025, we're all more connected, and you have to think that it is impossible for a game developer to avoid witnessing the work of fans. Morio Kishimoto is even on record saying that "The Final Horizon" DLC for Sonic Frontiers is his response to the modding community that sprung up around Sonic games on PC.
But I also want you to consider Sonic Mania, which was less than a decade ago. Sonic Mania happened because of eight years of vetting a specific team of Sonic fans, and even then, the fact that any of that happened at all is basically the result of a lot of lucky coin flips.
By that I mean you can trace a direct throughline from Sonic 4 Episode 1 all the way to Sonic Mania. Sonic 4 leaked, fans on Sonic Retro reacted to that leak, Sega partnered with Sonic Retro to get feedback, some of those fans were influential enough that they got a Special Thanks credit on Sonic 4 Episode 2, which lead to related people getting to remake/remaster Sonic CD, which lead to remaking/remastering Sonic 1, and then Sonic 2, which lead to them pitching a Sonic 3 remake/remaster that ended up getting retooled into Sonic Mania, a game that the suits at Sega probably didn't have tons of faith in and originally released at a budget price before scrambling to sell it again as Sonic Mania Plus at a higher price.
That took eight years. Of Sega dipping a toe into the pool a little bit, and a little bit more, and a little bit more, all the while making sure these guys knew what they were talking about and could deliver a product on time and on budget that people wanted and would buy.
When you have something as old as Sonic the Hedgehog, something so deliberately a cash cow at different points in its history, you don't mess with it unless you have to. If the goose starts laying golden eggs, it is your objective responsibility to change nothing about its habitat. Whatever is causing it lay the golden eggs must stay absolutely identical for as long as humanly possible so that it will lay more golden eggs.
Now consider an interview from just a couple weeks ago, about how dire the Sonic franchise was in 2015, and how in 2025, it's riding higher than it ever has been. You do not mess with the golden goose.
Despite all of these factors, some folks genuinely think Morio Kishimoto will read their 157 page manifesto about Sonic's visual design. That he will act on it. That, legally speaking, he is even allowed to act on it.
I am not saying they did a bad job. I am not saying they aren't allowed to express these opinions. I am saying that tagging Sega in this is arrogant, and I am also saying this is maybe the single worst possible time for anyone to make this case.
tangentwithtanner
blakekathryn
andulkaphoto
turnnoffyourmind
areudirty
