"I want to do is stay faithful to our game Sonic": Sonic team head wants to keep game and movie versions separate

In a recent interview with Video Games Chronicle, Sonic Team’s studio head Takashi Iizuka discussed the differences between “Movie Sonic” and “Video Game Sonic.”

He is glad to see the movies doing so well, introducing the franchise to a new audience, but he wants to keep the two separate. The studio head would like to keep the Sonic games featuring Sonic game characters going forward.

“What I want to do is stay faithful to our game Sonic and really expand on the game Sonic to incorporate new ideas that are going to get people excited about new games.”

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Sonic Team’s Takashi Iizuka talks about keeping the two Sonic franchises separate

The Sonic Team definitely wants to keep expanding the franchise to more audiences and get more people interested, but not by slapping “Movie Sonic” into any of the games. According to Iizuka, the movie Sonic came from video games, so it would not make sense to push the movie into the video games.

“In our mobile games, we do have ‘Movie Sonic’ appearing as a guest character, and that kind of collaboration feels really good because there are people who saw the movie and only understand the character through that.”

Mobile games are different, though. Movie Sonic does appear in SEGA’s mobile games as a guest, but according to him, that collaboration is fine. When it comes to the character of Sonic, that all comes from the video games, so instead of pushing the movie Sonic characteristics into the games, he wants to broaden the game’s appeal in other ways.

According to Takashi Iizuka, having Movie Sonic as a guest character isn’t a big deal, and it is something they want to do. At the same time, it is important to keep the essence of Video Game Sonic instead of forcing the movie characters into a setting where they don’t belong.

However, this isn’t to say the Sonic Team head isn’t happy with the movies. The success of the films has been great for SEGA since it created a wider audience for the company to try and appeal to with new games. Many who saw the movie have never played a Sonic game before, so now he wants to try creating content to appeal to those new fans as well.

The company sees it as a challenge to appeal to the film fans without shoehorning in the movie characters into upcoming games such as Sonic Frontiers. At the end of the day, SEGA wants to remain faithful to the Sonic games, but also build on it to make it more appealing to all of the new fans they picked up as a result of the movies.