Hopefully this is the appropriate board for this! http://www.sagexpo.org DISCLAIMER: The Sonic Amateur Games Expo, or SAGE, is not affiliated with SEGA in any way, shape, or form. This event is entirely driven by fans. Sonic the Hedgehog is property of SEGA. We'll be interviewing Naoto Ohshima as a way to wrap up SAGE on a high note. 8:45PM EST over SAGECAST. Besides his work at his own studio, Artoon, which is now AQ Interactive, he is also known for being the director of NiGHTS into Dreams, Burning Rangers, and Sonic CD, the original character designer of Sonic the Hedgehog, and is one of the founders of the franchise alongside Yuji Naka and Hirokazu Yasuhara. http://radio.sonicstadium.org:8000/cast.mp3 Get your questions ready, we'll be in the IRC taking questions and our lovely translator Sterling Diesel will help relay messages to him and back. IRC Details: Server: irc.rizon.net Channel: #sagexpo He also left this little picture for you guys! Due to this event we are going to move the Badnik Contest Results featuring Mike Pollock to 10PMEST.
...Wow. It's amazing to see that you guys actually got this arranged. o_o I don't know what to ask, really. Will be listening in though! Sounds incredibly exciting.
Wow. That's amazing. I'd like to ask what he thinks of the current Sonic games, after Sonic Adventure 2. Also, what time zone is this?
I'd ask him about which characters did he really design, including any of his scrapped characters (some of which might have been reused in modified form at a later time), and about the story involving Madonna, the non-robotic monsters, bee-Eggman and the scrapped Sonic band. Hey, if we can get enough info, somebody might be able to make a "What-if" Sonic 1. =P Also, any info he can remember on who designed who would be nice, seeing how we're still missing a lot of info on this.
I will take a gander afterwards, I guess! SAGE, the owner of the Sonic the Hedgehog copyright and everything affiliated with it, is true blue.
Bah, I'd love to take part, but gotta go to a Homecoming Dance with a friend. Looking forward to this, hope you guys get some interesting tidbits.
Naoto Ohshima huh? No kidding? That's pretty impressive. If he could clear up any mysteries, that'd be swell.
This should be pretty interesting. I'm not expecting anything earthshattering from this interview, but it'd be nice if we get to find out things we never knew before. Ask him what he thinks of them bringing back his design for Sonic the Hedgehog for Sonic Generations. I wanna know if he's excited/happy about it.
Well, I'm sure looking forward to this! I wonder what he worked on anything major between Sonic CD and NiGHTS. There's like a three-year gap of time between those games, and he was credited as "Original Character Concept" for Chaotix. EDIT: Actually, another quick look on Sega Retro states that he worked on Hyper Athlete (1996) doing "3D Background, & Camera Work." Now I really want to know how he juggled work with Konami and Sega toward the late 1990s. He worked on some Konami projects after Sonic Adventure, apparently.
Will there be an archived version of the audio, or a transcript of the interview, for people that can't be around for it? This is too huge not to.
I probably cant attend the chat, anyone willing to ask about scrapped stages in Sonic CD (including the bonus stage reassembling sonic 1's special stages) or any features he never got to add into the game due to time constraints in dev schedule.
Oh, perhaps somebody could also ask him about theat scrapped "warp effect" I found a while ago in Sonic 1, which could be later seen in the earliest screenshots of Sonic CD. Perhaps time travel was planned for Sonic 1 before the story was changed?
...Holy shit. Nice. Maybe I'll try my first crack at an IRC event. Trying to think of questions, got nothing so far. Edit: I'm surprised. I'm on the east coast so I'm set, but wow. I completely and utterly lucked out by checking up here a few minutes ago.