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"Sonic team made Ristar"

Discussion in 'General Sega Discussion' started by Cooljerk, Oct 18, 2023.

  1. Cooljerk

    Cooljerk

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    This is an old claim that gets repeated on the internet, "Sonic team made ristar." You can find it cited on multiple wikis, on forums, etc. And certainly there is cross-pollination between Ristar and Sonic, owing to the character having the same genesis originally as a rabbit. But with just a little thought, it should be apparent that this claim isn't true, most notably because Sonic Team didn't really exist until NiGHTS into Dreams was in production. Prior to NiGHTS into Dreams, "Sonic Team" hadn't been a thing since Sonic 1, with the "team" split up between USA and Japan. Prior to NiGHTS into Dreams, what people would think of as "Sonic Team" was actually Sega Technical Instute with a bunch of former SOJ members attached. Like, for example, nobody claims "Sonic Team made Sonic CD," but looking at the staff for Ristar, you'll find very little people who worked on Sonic 1, 2, 3, or Knuckles -- you'll find quite a few people who worked on Sonic CD and Knuckles Chaotix. Let's take a look at who worked on Ristar:

    Akira Nishino was the director, he his currently head of CS3. He would eventually work at Sonic Team while it made Phantasy Star Online, but mainly worked in Japan during the creation of the Sonic games.

    Takeshi Nimura was the game planner, and he would join Sonic Team for NiGHTS, but hadn't worked on any Sonic property prior to NiGHTS. In fact, Ristar appears to be one of the first games he worked on at Sega.

    Takumi Miyaki would also join Sonic Team for NiGHTS. Prior to Ristar, his involvement with the Sonic series was Sonic CD and Knuckles Chaotix.

    Koki Moji was a planet designer for the game. He has never worked on a Sonic property, and his only Sega game before Ristar was World Series Baseball.

    Kazuyuki Iwasawa was also a planet designer, and he similarly has never worked on a Sonic property. He worked on Shinobi III before Ristar, then went to work on the Panzer Dragoon Series.

    Mikiharu Oiwa was also a planet designer. They only worked on Ristar and a few sports games at Sega before leaving the company. They never worked on any Sonic game.

    Tomoko Sasaki worked on music, and would join Sonic Team during NiGHTS, to become a long time musician with Sonic Team. But prior to Ristar, he worked on Sonic CD and nothing else in the franchise.

    Hiroshi Kubota worked as a Sound programmer and is the first person to work on a Sonic game outside of Sonic CD or Knuckles Chaotix -- he worked on Sonic 1 and 2.

    Junya Kozakai is the other sound programmer for ristar, and Ristar appears to be his only game with Sega.

    Hiromasa Kaneko did the boss programming and, though he worked for sega for a while, he wouldn't work on any sonic team game until Sonic 2006.

    Shigeru Yoshida did the enemy programming, and he joined Sega around the time Ristar was in development. He did a few 32X projects, but never worked on any Sonic property.

    Naomi Hirai did enemy programming, and as far as I can tell, this is the only thing they ever worked on in the game industry.

    Takuya Matsumoto is credited as an "effects programmer" and starting with NiGHTS until Sonic Adventure became a major member of Sonic Team. He left Sega to follow Naoto Oshima to go work on Blinx the Time Sweeper.

    Atsuhiko Nakamura was the Project Director, and although he's worked all over Sega on a number of games, the closest he gets to Sonic Team is a Knuckles Chaotix credit, and he worked on Phantasy Star IV.

    Yukio Sato is the art director, and Ristar appears to be his first major project. He didn't do much else at Sega, and never worked on the Sonic series.

    There is some SOA staff credited too, but they are not the STI staff that worked on previous Sonic games:

    Rhonda Van was the producer, but the closest she got to working on Sonic was assisting with the Game Gear version of Sonic Spinball years after the STI original was made.

    Erik Wahlberg is the assistant producer, and his history is littered with SOA games, but none of them from STI. He worked on things like Eternal Champions or Greendog. The closest he comes to Sonic is the game gear sonic spinball port.

    That concludes the credits of the people who had a hand in the actual meat and bones of the game, the rest of the staff are things like Testers or Insturction Manual writers, of which they also did not work on Sonic at STI.

    So back to this claim that Ristar was made by Sonic Team -- it doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. A number of the people would join Sonic Team after NiGHTS into Dreams, but they largely had never worked on Sonic prior to that. Most of the team seems made up of people who worked primarily on things like 32X projects or Sega CD projects, but not so much Sonic stuff in particular. There are very few people in the credits list who really have *sonic games* on their resume.

    That brings us to the other often repeated claim -- Ristar uses the "Sonic Engine." There are a few bits of technical history to back this up. Ristar uses the 256x256 chunk mappings like Sonic 1 does, and also features Enigma compression. It seems most of what Ristar had access to was from the old Sonic stuff in japan that Sonic CD and Knuckles Chaotix were based off of, not the stuff that Yuji Naka's STI/Sonic Team were working on in America. For example, Ristar still uses SMPS 68k instead of the later Sonic game's SMPS Z80. FWIW I think the concept of "engine" is nebulous even today, but especially for the time Ristar was in development.

    What's the point of this topic? Just to further clarify what, if anything, "Sonic Team" has to do with Ristar which is actually very little if only retroactive. As in, it'd be more correct to say a few *future* Sonic Team members worked on Ristar, but hardly anybody from Sonic 1, 2, 3, Knuckles, or Spinball worked on the game. It'd be more correct to say more people who absolutely no ties to classic sonic team worked on ristar, than those who had ties.
     
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  2. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    According to the history, Sega Retro corrected this in mid-2017 (although it was being questioned before then).

    It came from a world that believed there was an entity called "Sonic Team" within Sega from 1991-onwards. We know better now :)
     
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  3. Cooljerk

    Cooljerk

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    The more cleared up thing isn't so much that Sonic Team didn't exist until NiGHTS into Dreams, it's more the idea that, even if they weren't called Sonic Team yet, a lot of the same people worked on the game. But that's not true. There is actually very little overlap between people who ever worked on Sonic, and the people who worked on Ristar, either proactively or retroactively. Its not just the name of the studio that doesn't line up, the actual team members themselves could never really be called "Sonic Team" at any point in history.
     
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  4. Chimes

    Chimes

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    Broke: Ristar was developed by "Sonic Team"
    Woke: The Illusion series is the precursor and inspiration for Sonic
    People like to say Alex Kidd is the precursor to Sonic, but I believe some of the seeds were actually planted in Castle and World of Illusion

    Edit: Okay, so it wasn't the series who directly *preceded* Sonic, but I believe Illusion still provided the foundation for Sega's development teams as a whole regarding how they approach platformers. Castle in particular seems like a independent lemma for Sonic's whole "bop and reach" approach.
     
    Last edited: Nov 3, 2023
  5. Cooljerk

    Cooljerk

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    World of Illusion released in 1992, so it'd be pretty hard for it to be any sort of inspiration for Sonic.

    As for Castle of Illusion, the credits have basically nobody who ever worked on a Sonic game outside of a handful of game gear titles.

    Yuji Naka specifically cites Ghouls n Ghosts as the inspiration for Sonic's physics, as he was fiddling around with momentum in that game on the slanted floors.

    An aside, as someone who was a die hard Master System fan before the Genesis was even a thing, Opa-Opa had a much bigger presence and mindshare on the system than Alex Kidd. Opa-Opa appeared in more cross overs than Alex Kidd, too.
     
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  6. Chimes

    Chimes

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    fast mickey go broom
     
  7. Trippled

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    for some reason, people have had a hard time crediting games to just "Sega". AM7 with a ton of games being credited to never existed in that form.
     
  8. I think what got a lot of people was Sonic Team Presents when you started the 1st game and it was shown on the case to Sonic CD. It made me think there was a Sonic Team way before NiGHTS
     
    Last edited: Oct 19, 2023
  9. Trippled

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    Another Naka-ism. I remember in an interview "Unless it's me or Oshima...its not Sonic Team!!"
     
  10. When I saw Sonic Team Presents at the start of Sonic on the MD and then saw Sonic Team Presents on the case to Sonic CD (Japan) at the import shop I thought there was a Sonic Team. I was completely thrown when SEGA mag reported that Sonic Team was being set up to develop NiGHTS and given the highest priority even above any AM title for the Arcades.
     
  11. Clownacy

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    Ristar's SMPS 68k driver is not derived from Sonic 1's SMPS 68k driver: both are forked from different iterations of the 'main' SMPS 68k driver. The game could have just as easily used SMPS Z80, like Chaotix did, but SMPS 68k was seemingly used so that the Z80 would be free to play more than one DAC sample at once. Using Enigma isn't anything special, as it is one of a handful of standard compression formats that appeared in many games, as well as the Mega CD's BIOS.
     
    Last edited: Oct 19, 2023
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  12. Billy

    Billy

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    I think a small part of the confusion comes from its inclusion in Sonic Mega Collection. Though it seems like anything tangentially related to Sonic got included, like Flicky. Including other STI games, in the case of Plus.
     
  13. The KKM

    The KKM

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    Didn't Yuji Uekawa design Ristar? That also adds to it- when the artist most known for making the Modern Sonic design first designed this character, resulting in a very similar art style (the enemies in Ristar definitely are cut from the same cloth as the enemies in Chaotix), it becomes easy to connect the dots there.

    While we're questioning things, do we know if Ristar was actually based on the original rabbit-grabs-things concept for Sonic 1 at all? Even you mentioned that as fact when opening the thread, but is there a source or are we at risk of another taken-as-self-evident assumption?
     
  14. saxman

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    Most I know about Ristar is the initialization code appears to match that of Sonic 2. Just look at the two in a hex editor. However, that too could be a standard library-type thing that floated around Sega. As I posted a year or so ago, Zoom uses the very same RAM locations for button presses and the game "mode" (F600-onward) as the Sonic games. And Ghouls 'N' Ghosts has the same basic cheat codes as Sonic 1. So I think these things just get passed around sometimes. But it doesn't mean there's a hard connection between the games (though I fully realize Naka's connection to GNG).
     
  15. Cooljerk

    Cooljerk

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    Hence the part of my post about the concept of an "engine" being nebulous to begin with. There is no definition of engine. An engine is a combination of reused code and the tools you use to produce content for your game. Sega's standard development tools, could be considered an "engine" since "engine" itself is ill defined.

    FWIW, that entire section wasn't meant to support the claim that Ristar uses the sonic "engine," only to describe *why* people say it uses the "engine." I'm of the mindset that calling something the "sonic engine" unless you're literally talking about Sonic 2 or 3 or Knuckles is poor verbiage.
     
  16. Devon

    Devon

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    If you are referring to the initialization code located from 0x206 to 0x2FF, then just about every licensed Genesis game has it from what I understand (I've looked at a fair few other games, and they all had the exact same initialization code; I've yet to find an officially licensed game that *doesn't* use it). It's Sega's stock initialization code, officially referred to as ICD_BLK4.PRG (you can find the source code here). The actual game initialization code after is very different from the Sonic games.
     
  17. That was no doubt the case back then. I seem to remember Project Sonic being in fact called Project Naka by the team members when working on Sonic Adv for the Saturn, which at the time Oshima-san was on direction duties. Also, remember one interview with Naka saying he wasn't worried over Sonic CD and how it was in safe hands because Oshima-san was directing it.
     
  18. Brainulator

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    Technically, the code goes from 0x206 to 0x305:

    Code (Text):
    1. *   *************************************************************
    2. *   *                             *
    3. *   *    ICD_END is GAME_PROGRAM start_address             *
    4. *   *      ICD_END = START+$100                 *
    5. *   *    this program size is just 256 byte.             *
    6. *   *                             *
    7. *   *************************************************************
    Amusingly, this code actually is a bit different in the Sonic 1 prototype we have, also within 256 bytes.
     
  19. Mentski

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    Sonic Team made Ristar in the same way AM2 made Outrun.
     
  20. Trippled

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    Nope. Outrun has been retroactively fitted into the AM2 gameography through the old defunct Sega AM2 website. Same did not happen with Ristar.