"Sonic team made Ristar"

This is an old claim that gets repeated on the internet, "Sonic team made ristar." You can find it cited on multiple wikis, on forums, etc. And certainly there is cross-pollination between Ristar and Sonic, owing to the character having the same genesis originally as a rabbit. But with just a little thought, it should be apparent that this claim isn't true, most notably because Sonic Team didn't really exist until NiGHTS into Dreams was in production. Prior to NiGHTS into Dreams, "Sonic Team" hadn't been a thing since Sonic 1, with the "team" split up between USA and Japan. Prior to NiGHTS into Dreams, what people would think of as "Sonic Team" was actually Sega Technical Instute with a bunch of former SOJ members attached. Like, for example, nobody claims "Sonic Team made Sonic CD," but looking at the staff for Ristar, you'll find very little people who worked on Sonic 1, 2, 3, or Knuckles -- you'll find quite a few people who worked on Sonic CD and Knuckles Chaotix. Let's take a look at who worked on Ristar:

Akira Nishino was the director, he his currently head of CS3. He would eventually work at Sonic Team while it made Phantasy Star Online, but mainly worked in Japan during the creation of the Sonic games.

Takeshi Nimura was the game planner, and he would join Sonic Team for NiGHTS, but hadn't worked on any Sonic property prior to NiGHTS. In fact, Ristar appears to be one of the first games he worked on at Sega.

Takumi Miyaki would also join Sonic Team for NiGHTS. Prior to Ristar, his involvement with the Sonic series was Sonic CD and Knuckles Chaotix.

Koki Moji was a planet designer for the game. He has never worked on a Sonic property, and his only Sega game before Ristar was World Series Baseball.

Kazuyuki Iwasawa was also a planet designer, and he similarly has never worked on a Sonic property. He worked on Shinobi III before Ristar, then went to work on the Panzer Dragoon Series.

Mikiharu Oiwa was also a planet designer. They only worked on Ristar and a few sports games at Sega before leaving the company. They never worked on any Sonic game.

Tomoko Sasaki worked on music, and would join Sonic Team during NiGHTS, to become a long time musician with Sonic Team. But prior to Ristar, he worked on Sonic CD and nothing else in the franchise.

Hiroshi Kubota worked as a Sound programmer and is the first person to work on a Sonic game outside of Sonic CD or Knuckles Chaotix -- he worked on Sonic 1 and 2.

Junya Kozakai is the other sound programmer for ristar, and Ristar appears to be his only game with Sega.

Hiromasa Kaneko did the boss programming and, though he worked for sega for a while, he wouldn't work on any sonic team game until Sonic 2006.

Shigeru Yoshida did the enemy programming, and he joined Sega around the time Ristar was in development. He did a few 32X projects, but never worked on any Sonic property.

Naomi Hirai did enemy programming, and as far as I can tell, this is the only thing they ever worked on in the game industry.

Takuya Matsumoto is credited as an "effects programmer" and starting with NiGHTS until Sonic Adventure became a major member of Sonic Team. He left Sega to follow Naoto Oshima to go work on Blinx the Time Sweeper.

Atsuhiko Nakamura was the Project Director, and although he's worked all over Sega on a number of games, the closest he gets to Sonic Team is a Knuckles Chaotix credit, and he worked on Phantasy Star IV.

Yukio Sato is the art director, and Ristar appears to be his first major project. He didn't do much else at Sega, and never worked on the Sonic series.

There is some SOA staff credited too, but they are not the STI staff that worked on previous Sonic games:

Rhonda Van was the producer, but the closest she got to working on Sonic was assisting with the Game Gear version of Sonic Spinball years after the STI original was made.

Erik Wahlberg is the assistant producer, and his history is littered with SOA games, but none of them from STI. He worked on things like Eternal Champions or Greendog. The closest he comes to Sonic is the game gear sonic spinball port.

That concludes the credits of the people who had a hand in the actual meat and bones of the game, the rest of the staff are things like Testers or Insturction Manual writers, of which they also did not work on Sonic at STI.

So back to this claim that Ristar was made by Sonic Team -- it doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. A number of the people would join Sonic Team after NiGHTS into Dreams, but they largely had never worked on Sonic prior to that. Most of the team seems made up of people who worked primarily on things like 32X projects or Sega CD projects, but not so much Sonic stuff in particular. There are very few people in the credits list who really have *sonic games* on their resume.

That brings us to the other often repeated claim -- Ristar uses the "Sonic Engine." There are a few bits of technical history to back this up. Ristar uses the 256x256 chunk mappings like Sonic 1 does, and also features Enigma compression. It seems most of what Ristar had access to was from the old Sonic stuff in japan that Sonic CD and Knuckles Chaotix were based off of, not the stuff that Yuji Naka's STI/Sonic Team were working on in America. For example, Ristar still uses SMPS 68k instead of the later Sonic game's SMPS Z80. FWIW I think the concept of "engine" is nebulous even today, but especially for the time Ristar was in development.

What's the point of this topic? Just to further clarify what, if anything, "Sonic Team" has to do with Ristar which is actually very little if only retroactive. As in, it'd be more correct to say a few *future* Sonic Team members worked on Ristar, but hardly anybody from Sonic 1, 2, 3, Knuckles, or Spinball worked on the game. It'd be more correct to say more people who absolutely no ties to classic sonic team worked on ristar, than those who had ties.

 

The more cleared up thing isn't so much that Sonic Team didn't exist until NiGHTS into Dreams, it's more the idea that, even if they weren't called Sonic Team yet, a lot of the same people worked on the game. But that's not true. There is actually very little overlap between people who ever worked on Sonic, and the people who worked on Ristar, either proactively or retroactively. Its not just the name of the studio that doesn't line up, the actual team members themselves could never really be called "Sonic Team" at any point in history.

 

World of Illusion released in 1992, so it'd be pretty hard for it to be any sort of inspiration for Sonic.

As for Castle of Illusion, the credits have basically nobody who ever worked on a Sonic game outside of a handful of game gear titles.

Yuji Naka specifically cites Ghouls n Ghosts as the inspiration for Sonic's physics, as he was fiddling around with momentum in that game on the slanted floors.

An aside, as someone who was a die hard Master System fan before the Genesis was even a thing, Opa-Opa had a much bigger presence and mindshare on the system than Alex Kidd. Opa-Opa appeared in more cross overs than Alex Kidd, too.

 

Hence the part of my post about the concept of an "engine" being nebulous to begin with. There is no definition of engine. An engine is a combination of reused code and the tools you use to produce content for your game. Sega's standard development tools, could be considered an "engine" since "engine" itself is ill defined.

FWIW, that entire section wasn't meant to support the claim that Ristar uses the sonic "engine," only to describe *why* people say it uses the "engine." I'm of the mindset that calling something the "sonic engine" unless you're literally talking about Sonic 2 or 3 or Knuckles is poor verbiage.