On another forum I frequent, the question of Naoto ?shima's involvement in Knuckles' Chaotix was brought up. I know he was credited for "Original Character Concept" but other than that, did he have any direct involvement with the development of Chaotix? This is a quote from the discussion: Any help is appreciated.
I thought I should bump this. We don't really know what input he had on the Chaotix project other than the credit he had. So, anyone?
Well, we know that Ohshima did the sprites for Sonic 1. Mighty's sprites are edits (of edits) of those sprites. I'm guessing that's all there is to it. Although... the same thing is true in Sonic 2, but he wasn't credited or even thanked. And Yamaguchi's Tails sprites are in Sonic 3 and Knuckles, again with no attribution. But who knows, credits are handled differently by different teams.
I personally feel like the Chaotix artstyle gave the same kind of vibes as Sonic and especially Sonic CD do. I'd like to believe he did the art work on Chaotix like he did on the other two Sonic games. I'm probably very wrong though.
...You know, I have nothing ironclad to back that up. But I've always assumed from the credits where it says: CHARACTER DESIGN: BIG ISLAND it meant he did the all the sprites, and that Jina Ishiwatari and Rieko Kodama did the zone art because: DESIGN: JINYA / PHENIX RIE Now I realise this assumption is a bit sketchy... so forget his involvement with Chaotix for a minute - what do we actually know about his involvement with Sonic 1?
Isn't him designing Sonic all we really know about his involvement with the Sonic games? I don't think the oldest official artwork we know of is even credited to him...
I know it's bad form to pester the developers about every little thing, but someone should really contact him and ask whether he did the literal sprites or not (for Sonic, badniks, and Robotnik). It's not just something we don't know about Ohshima, but something pretty crucial we don't know about Sonic - if we don't know who drew his original sprites, that's pretty bad! But I guess we can scour interviews like mad before we bother bugging the man.