He posted on three days, right? These two from 23th Nov: https://twitter.com/okanotion/status/1727508980963188852 https://twitter.com/okanotion/status/1727510951774306557 27th Nov: https://twitter.com/okanotion/status/1729050621054214159 https://twitter.com/okanotion/status/1729058696842662271 5th Dec: https://twitter.com/okanotion/status/1731996742395035905 https://twitter.com/okanotion/status/1731999317672763554 https://twitter.com/okanotion/status/1732001403244270048 Can someone please link his post with drawings 5 to 8 from 27th Nov? I can't seem to find it! Are there more??? Have they already been uploaded?
I'm guessing that since "Project Sonic" was an incentive to remarket Sonic potentially to Japanese audiences, with Sonic Adventure eventually being the end of that journey; they didn't want 3DB to appear as the same thing it essentially was in the west (Sonic's false start into 3D graphics).
Project Sonic was all about introducing Sonic to Japanese players. My guess is that they were aware that Sonic 3D was years behind what the competition was offering, so they held off its release until SA1 was out to avoid making a bad first impression. Plus the MD version was skipped over by Japan due to the console's earlier death there, so Japanese players wouldn't have been aware that the Saturn version was a port of an MD game and would have judged it as 5th gen game.
I think that is a little unfair myself. There were factors coming into play that SEGA didn't foresee. I would imagine that SEGA Japan was expecting NiGHTS to be a much bigger hit worldwide and sell loads of hardware too, but didn't expect SEGA America and STI to utterly cock up and mishandle the Sonic Extreme project as they did. I would imagine in SEGA Japan's plans the Sonic Team would haven't had to worry about a Sonic game for Saturn, for a number of years, but those factors changed that. Then when you had the Sonic Team down to make a Saturn Sonic game in 1996 you then had Square release Tobal No 1 with a demo of FF7 and PS sales in Japan exploded and overtook the Saturn, where SEGA Japan goes from thinking we've won the Japanese market to then losing it almost more so when the final FF7 game did ship in Japan the PS smashed the hardware sales so hard I think even the N64 outovertook the Saturn hardware sales for a couple of months and so then the talk was the Saturn is losing lets make it for the DC instead?
I remember reading some excerpt from an interview from a Sonic Team member. That member said that he thought Sonic was outdated during the days of NiGHTS. I don't know if this reflected the thoughts of other ST members and I overall need to do some research.
I think players and the Sonic Team themself's got bored of Sonic and wanted something new and different. I would imagine SOJ and Sonic Team knew they would have to make a Sonic game for the Saturn at some stage, but they were hoping Clockwork Knight and NiGHTS would be big sellers and the Sonic Team could take a break from Sonic while SEGA America and STI made a Sonic title and the real Sonic Team could make a Sonic title way late into the Saturn life. That's what I felt anyway
