I think it's very possible that SOA had a substantial role in shaping Sonic's design. it's not exactly uncommon in the game industry for executives to request or make major changes to character designs. This idea that a game's core developers are the 'true' creators is very misleading although a common one online. I think the main issue is that they might just misremember certain things. Sonic might not have had fangs, but from the early concept art I've seen they definitely did clean his image up to be more friendly and approachable. That's the main point which I remember Madeline making. She's not saying "Sonic had fangs, check out this obscure, deep Sonic lore, and also, I really made Sonic" but "Sonic was much more hard-edged in design when I saw him and I made some changes to him, for example, I'm pretty sure he had fangs". I think it's very unlikely that Madeline and Kalinsky are intentionally lying in a coordinated conspiracy to get attention for making Sonic. They don't even try to have any real role or connection to the series outside of that one claim and I'm pretty sure they don't even talk about it that often do they? When Kalinsky said he made Sonic's shoes, he might have just been mistaken. Not really any different to Craig Stitt saying that the chaos emeralds didn't exist when he made Hidden Palace's art. Is he lying to claim credit for the chaos emeralds? No, he's just misremembering. I don't know much about it honestly, and perhaps they are wrong about everything they've said, but I think it's much more likely that they are just misremembering.
While I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the discrepancies were the result of poor memory, I can't help but notice that many of them happen to be self-serving. You can even see contradictions among SoA accounts alone (edit: some of them were covered here). It honestly seems to me like there was some embellishment in people's accounts.
I agree with what you're saying about the fangs and Schroeder. I believe that the 'fang' thing originated possibly in that making-of documentary in which Schroeder says she had to go to Japan and de-fang Sonic (or something to that effect). She's talking about something that happened many years in the past and she probably hadn't thought about it for a long time. But people have overlooked this and taken her at her word, despite there not being evidence to support it. I imagine she saw the original concept art, went to Japan, and worked with the team to make it smoother. However, I think we should be a bit more suspicious of Kalinske's accounts. He most certainly was not at Sega when the original design work was being done, yet in all interviews about Sonic's creation, he says WE saved Sonic by re-designing him. He is clearly claiming credit for Sonic, and any interview where talks about it shows that (and there have been a lot in recent years). He claims he saved Sonic from being a goth with fangs, he added the red shoes, etc. I don't know how this could possibly be a case of mistaken memory since he wasn't at Sega at the time. So in Schroeder's case, yes, she's probably just not remembering accurately, but in Kalinske's case, I do believe he is trying to insert himself into the narrative.
Thanks for that. I do check there every couple days or so. It seems there is more today than I saw yesterday. Woohoo.
I have to wonder... Sonic 1 Proto has an alternate "Night Time" palette for GHZ, and Sonic 3 had a barely-implemented "Night Time Mode". Could there have been plans for Chaotix-style day and night cycles since the very first game, that just was never properly feasible until the extra power of the 32x? Or could it just be that, since it's just a darker version of GHZ, it was used for testing on various CRT TVs to find the best contrast/brightness?
Every time this is posted one of our wiki sysops dies. Better start clapping to bring them back. It's why we've not seen Andlabs in years - you kids didn't clap long enough.
Sonic 3's "night mode" isn't really a feature, it's more like collision testing or something (it's not available in S3K). But this one is interesting. I'm wondering if it's an earlier palette, one from when ghz was at night in the Tokyo game show demo
So This is the 2011 documentary that tied in with Sonic Generations. Tom Kalinske has said things since, but this one was officially sactioned by Sega and has everyone together in one place. And doesn't associate Sega of America with the character's design, just Sonic's "world" - producing a backstory and giving the character a personality to make him more acceptable to US audiences. The visuals are misleading (I bet they borrowed a lot of it from us), but there's nothing about fangs or shoes here. They just talk about making the character "softer"... which we probably can't comment too much on because I don't think we've seen the "hard" version of the character (unless it was literally, "stop making him look angry"). Either way the meddling seems more for Winter CES as their tool against the Super NES. And I can totally see Tom Kalinske getting involved in some way about that - it was their secret flagship project.
According to whoever wrote this section from TCRF, The night look from TGS was more a result of bad scanning or quality of pictures. Although, I can't really say for certain, but then again. I'm not overly knowledgeable on pallettes, scanning etc. EDIT:. It would appear it's daytime. Haven't checked TGS pics in ages.
I'd put money on the 1990 Tokyo Toy Show ROM being an entirely separate project to the final Sonic the Hedgehog release. If you were going to redesign all the assets and follow an actual game plan, it would be quicker to start from a clean slate.
And then there's the 2009 GameTap video that talks about fangs and Madonna which I haven't seen in over a decade: We really need all this stuff in one place on the wiki. If you search "history of Sonic the Hedgehog" on YouTube you just get a bazillion fan videos regurgitating things from Sonic Retro. The official material is quite hard to find.
I am mistaken about them citing Console Wars specifically, but here's the post: With more discussion about Kalinske and his claims in Console Wars in the topic itself such as:
Gonna bet that Tom or Madeline saw some of Oshima's drawings of Sonic with sharp teeth and thought saying they shouldn't do that in-game meant they had a part in changing it, haha. You know, despite that Oshima still drew him like that multiple times afterward through the 90s: So yeah, more stuff that didn't actually happen. I imagine it was probably Naka, Yasuhara and others at Sonic Team who were against it before anything else, since it seems to only appear in any Sonic media when it's Oshima's art (and non-promo material, at that).
Ya gotta agree with softening the fangs. The one fang look they use sometimes is ok though, but triangle teeth is def a bit much
Oh yeah, it's definitely a bit much. He has a tick for putting that on his designs though, since he wanted to do the same with NiGHTS early on. He got his sharp toothed character eventually with Blinx, I suppose. lol
I think the look from the manga linked to earlier could fall somewhere within "cute little fang" territory depending on the drawing, but the overall design shown in places like the last page, as well as the above triangle teeth, comes off to me as too menacing to be cool.
I agree that little fangs are fine, but the sharp teeth are pushing it. My guess is that they're supposed to give him a "bad boy" look, but they only make him look evil or voracious to me... Come to think of it, I find it pretty ironic that SoA objected to the fangs and rock band, only to give Sonic a mohawk and turn Robotnik into a grotesque eye-less abomination Actually I'm pretty sure Nights' final design still has sharp teeth, they're just hidden most of the time: Spoiler