Jason Griffith: Shadow the Hedgehog was going to be M-rated, with F-bombs

I think what's more likely is rather than an M-rated version of the game, it may have just been recorded with the intention of being censored (a-la Conkers Bad Fur Day) later.

 

I feel like it's honestly expecting too much for them to actually still have the original files. They probably don't even have the original recordings for stuff as important as the Chao voices considering those are as compressed as sound effects in from games can be in stuff as recent as Sonic Frontiers Prologue.

 

Imagine the forum reactions to that...

 

I can definitely buy this. This was the time where every Western publisher wanted to get in on that GTA money, even Naughty Dog gave it a shot with Jak and Daxter. I could see SOA pushing for a higher rating in a way that would keep SOJ in the dark in an attempt to drive sales and/or controversy.

 

I gotta ask: do you still have that drawing?

If the voice files were censored, I would imagine not.

 

So just to clarify, this is not the first time I've heard this rumor being discussed. I watched video of him talking about this at some point, only for a fan to later give the much more exaggerated take.

Go to 35 minutes in to hear more in context.

My conclusion is, exactly like what he said in the tweet, there are recordings of alternate takes with more swearing. Possibly an F bomb. The tapes may or may not still exist, but it's just a few altered lines here and there before the ratings were finalized. As he calls them "just in case" recordings.

 

If the latest posts in this topic are anything to go by, I'd say there's a chance these alternate versions may still be in some version of the game. The expectation is that someone on Retro would have dissected Shadow to bits, but there are regional variants of Shadow on multiple formats, plus a couple of pre-releases (and probably other demos elsewhere) - have they all been checked? I'd put money on "no".

People rarely take the step to actually look for things, they just expect it all served on a plate.

 

Unfortunately not, but here's a replication

 

I was gonna say "why is this big news all of a sudden?" I likewise have seen this particular video and no one made that big of a deal then.

Personally speaking though, you can have the edgy elements for Shadow if you want, but I think the swearing and guns are going overboard for Shadow. The decision to give him vehicles in 06 and deal with really dark themes and creatures works, but if you give him guns and swearing then suddenly it becomes laughable.

 

So I thought about it more : saying there was an "M rated cut" of Shadow the Hedgehog is a bit of an exaggeration. There were voice recordings with harsher language recorded solely by the dubbing team in case SEGA of America wanted to market this towards an older audience but no one at SEGA of Japan or Sonic Team had any intention to make anything but a slightly more edgy game for older kids.

Someone probably did ask them to recorded M rated language versions in the very rare chance SEGA of America decided to go that route but it was never really taken seriously and probably didn't get past a conversation with someone in marketing who had half a brain to who this series' target audience is.

From the information we have this is what I can piece together best.

 

I'm not sure what the community consensus was (as I recall, Retro was much more of a like-minded group of tech experts back then), but the general public at large was turning against the kind of colorful kid-friendly platforming you see in Heroes. Kids as young as 8 years old were playing GTA, platformer series were being retooled to have more guns and violence (Jak & Daxter, Ratchet & Clank, etc) and even Zelda got booed by its grown adult fans for how "kiddy" it was. Looking back at 2005 gamer culture, especially the kind of shit you'd see on MTV and G4, it's no wonder SEGA felt pressured to add guns. It's not like Shadow was an isolated incident. The West was absolutely dominating Japan at the time and Japanese games were catering more and more to Western tastes. And in a post-9/11 society, that's exactly what it was going to result in.

 

Try out this one, "Where the FUCK is that DAMN fourth chaos emerald?" Gotta put more emphasis on the swears to show how cool he is.

 

From what I understand, Shadow was a result of Takashi Iizuka and pals chasing trends (I think he admitted as much at some point: that shooters were big in the West, so Sonic Team tried to make one). The collective response was more along the lines of "... okay?" - this pre-dates Sonic 06 so there wasn't a history of Sonic Team making out-right terrible decisions, and as a spin-off, you could always pretend it didn't exist at a later date (which worked quite well in the end).

This was a more up-market, classic Sonic research driven forum at the time, so IIRC there wasn't a huge amount of hype for Shadow here. I thought the weapons and bikes were stupid and unnecessary, but I remember thinking it was stupider swapping the red particles for green ones in order to get a E10+ rating, for this mythical group of people people who desperately wanted to fire guns, but not know where the bullets went. I also can't remember how much overlap there was between Sonic 06's announcement and Shadow's launch - 06 was definitely a bigger thing since the early material looks substantially better than the final game, and it was as close as the franchise got to Sonic Adventure 3.


There were definitely a few Japanese publishers trying to sell darker, gritter video games in the West, although ironically, Vice City and San Andreas are probably the amongst the most colourful and lighthearted third-person shooters at the time. I mean, Tommy Vercetti runs around a beach with a Hawaiian shirt, so I'm not really sure what was going on.

 

Clearly, San Andreas was unknown to them, and they recognized GTA 3 was superior to Vice City, and so they rightfully decided to start the game in a location similar to Liberty City.

Spoiler

Which makes me think... It'd be kinda cool if Westopolis was a similarly run down city to Liberty City. Assuming there's nothing I'm forgetting saying that's where the UF President lives, that's probably going to be my headcanon.

 

I don't remember the source of this but the anecdote I heard was that Iizuka was hospitalized shortly after Heroes released due to chronic stress (which is fair when you remember he was basically doing all of the design and planning on that game by himself towards the end of its development). While he was in there he had a TV and PS2 set up and he played Jak 2 and GTA III. After playing those games he thought to himself "yo... I should make a Sonic game like this..."

 

Reminds me when I was in Middle and High School that some people made fun of the fact I was into Nintendo games, but some were cool with Sonic mostly because of Shadow using guns.

 

Damn.

 

Shadow the Hedgehog if it was written by Vivziepop.