I'm sure everyone is well aware of this piece of 'trivia': It's been floating around for as long as I can remember, and is even featured on Knuckles' page on the wiki. Is this just an old rumour that's been assumed fact and never really questioned, or do we have a hard source on it? I can't seem to find one, and the wiki doesn't have any information to back it up either. I think I've heard it mentioned that it came from an old magazine, but that's all I've got to go on. I'm doubting how reliable it is.
From memory (which may be dodgy) it comes from this interview: https://web.archive.org/web/20061104155413/http://sega.jp/community/creators/vol_28/1.html I don't think he actually mentions Nike, but he does talk about sportswear. Here is a machine translation:
Thanks Windii! Wow, a Nike logo on Knuckles chest, a McDonalds promotion which forced them to split the game in two when they fell behind schedule, and of course the MJ music which has dammed the game to the past... Sonic 3 was really a tie-in circus.
Yet somehow it's still a masterpiece. It really is shocking so many things, specifically the MJ stuff and the game being split could all hit the same game but the team still managed to come out on top of it.
https://segaretro.org/Category:Japanese_interviews Get it mirrored, get it translated, get it referenced. also this is news to me - do we have a reference for this one?
I think that's what makes Sonic 3 (& Knuckles) so good - the game stands on it's own even when you take away all those things. Obvious tie-ins and references work for that moment, but can horrifically date a product once that period's over. Google Translate gives us an alternate universe where Takashi Yuda went a bit loopy it seems:
I didn't know about that interview, nice to get confirmation on that rumor's veracity. I wonder, if the deal with Nike had gone as planned, would Knux be wearing Nike shoes ala Sonic's Soap shoes in SA2? How long until fans come up with OC "Nikles the Dino", a green dinosaur sporting Nike shoes? :v:
It's in the Pix'n Love Sonic history book. From memory, Takashi Iizuka mentions that Sonic 3 missed the Xmas 93 release date, but when Feb 94 rolled around, they had to get it out the door because they were doing a tie-in with McDonalds and so couldn't delay it any further.
This sounds more like the licensing plan came to mind AFTER the design and not the other way around like that image would have you believe. That kuma mark is a thing seen in several Japanese character designs and not a remnant of a Nike logo.
Yes, I think that's perhaps the correct interpretation. Rather than the original intent being to make a Nike tie-in, they developed Knuckles and then considered doing a tie-in that, for whatever reason and at whatever stage of conceptualisation, didn't come to fruition.
It's also recounted in the 2014 Console Wars book--IGN had an article about "facts of Sonic's history" that were taken from the work, and the McDonald's promotion splitting the game in two was one of the facts mentioned. (I actually asked about this story and compiled some information about this over a year ago in the Supreme Topic of Other Knowledge thread.)
Windii's translation (which was only posted in this thread yesterday), was the first time we had a proper translation of Yuda's comments. Prior to yesterday we only had the machine translation where that nuance isn't clear at all. So that's probably why people thought it was the other way around.
This is pretty great. It makes me chuckle that with just a tiny bit of research and a better translation of Yuda's words, the Did You Know Gaming image suddenly now reads like a sensationalist Fox News/Daily Mail headline... "WAS GOING TO BE THE NIKE LOGO" [fact] "FAILED PROMOTIONAL DEAL" [fact] When in reality, it was a bit of a "What-if" thing from the start by the sounds of it. Makes me wonder how many other bits of game trivia like this are actually just vague non-troversies? Then again, I'm under the impression that Did You Know Gaming are more about trying to blow your mind with EXTREME trivia at the expense of whatever the truth might be, so I doubt they'd be too bothered about spicing up the facts either way.
I got zero knowledge about Nike's shoes. However, when I first posted a link to this interview on The GHZ Newsboard (way back in the early 2000s, 2003 I think), several of the forum members posted photos of a Nike trainer that was released in 1993 and closely resembled Knuckles final shoes (I think there were only minor differences - maybe the colors were different). So I guess, in a way, he is wearing Nike shoes. That explains why Knuckles shoes are so much different from the rest of the classic cast (He's the only one who has a metal plate on the top) Although this was over a decade ago, so I might be misremembering. I want to say that the photo of the actual Nike trainers were a prototype, so they might not have been released, but I could be wrong on that. But I distinctly remember seeing the photo and being amazed at how much they resemble Knuckles' shoes. Anyone know enough about Nike to verify?
I'm not usually this blunt about these things, but DYKG are unreliable, full stop. Not only are their facts often incorrect, but they also rarely (never?) seem to cite their sources, or at least they didn't before I stopped watching them years ago. The final nail in the coffin for me was when they released their first Crash Bandicoot video, which was almost entirely comprised of information that came from my fan site (though it wasn't credited, of course). This included topics from an interview I did with Jason Rubin once, which turned out to be particularly egregious, as some of the answers in that interview have since been disputed by other people who worked with him on the first title. Of particular note is the way he seemingly misrepresented UIS's Marketing Director's behavior and exaggerated things in Naughty Dog's favor. If DYKG linked to their sources, people would have been able to easily find an update to that story a few years ago.
Wow, that's shocking. Although that definitely matches how I was feeling about DYKG. You know something's wrong when Epic Death Battles start coming across as the more informative source for characters/IP's...
Just realized my wording was a bit ambiguous there. To clarify, it was Rubin who slandered the marketing director, not whoever runs DYKG. They're more about stealing other people's research and not caring when their information is wrong (this case being a textbook example of two wrongs not making a right).
I'm guessing there isn't an "in-booklet" reason Knux has the crescent symbol on him? I guess I'd assume it's some sort of tribal symbol among the Echidnas