The Supreme Topic of 'Other' Knowledge.

Haha! Actually realizing Max The Parrot's design is extremely close to one of the birds submitted as a character in the original internal design contest.



Switched pants for a jacket, and lost some weight.

And while I do know Charmy has been around for a long, LONG time. I'm saying they thought of needing a "flying character", and initially went with Max, but eventually went with Charmy. Going with a tiny bee is a bit weirder than a bird, but then so is making an Echidna glide and a fox fly.

 

I suspect this new group image pre-dates the existence of Chaotix by several years. I mean the obvious "flying character" to include is Tails - maybe it even pre-dates Sonic 2!



Although I think it's probably more of a case of having two schools of thought - there's the US-side building Sonic 2 and 3 (and thus establishing Tails and Knuckles), and then there's the Japanese side, which is basically Naoto Oshima inventing things that in the end, nobody cared about. I vote that this probably happened before Sonic CD became serious and Tails became a thing, so maybe late 1992?

Then in 1994, Sonic Crackers is pitched, they gut out Sonic and Tails for whatever reason, and dig out some of Oshima's old designs to fill out the cast. And then create Espio. And then decide Espio sucks.

And then there aren't any proper Sonic games made by in-house by Sonic Team in Japan until Sonic Adventure. Everyone else picks and chooses characters from both sides of the pond.

 

Is it my memory being bad, or was there an interview years ago that said they wanted to include Ray in Chaotix ?

 

Oh no kidding you can do that now? Technology can be great.

And with all this Ray talk lately now I'm surprised that he wasn't included in Chaotix, especially considering how Tails' character slot still exists in the game as a bunch of garbled nonsense. Ray would have made a great Tails replacement.

So basically then the only original characters in Chaotix were Espio and Heavy right? Because the bomb is from Sonic 1, Vector was in concept art, Mighty was in SegaSonic arcade, and Charmy was in those early mangas. That also kind of explains why Espio was almost the main character, he was the only legit new character and would have been the perfect ring leader for this island of misfit characters.

As for the Mania team having access to this art, I bet they did and chose to ignore it, as from their art alone Mighty seems to have Sonic proportions like the in game Chaotix sprites and Ray has been given a slight redesign to fall more in line with the comics.

 

Doesn't ring a bell.

 

Not to mention that Tails and Ray both use yellow/orange.

 

That's probably the only thing about the Mania artwork that bothers me after seeing Oshima's concept art, both Mighty and Ray's proportions being basically the same as Sonic's while they're respectively lankier and chubbier in the size chart, making them look much less like "Sonic clones".

 

The recently released "The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers: Volume 3" reveals the creators of all the early Sonic characters.

From the Naoto Ohshima interview:

From the Manabu Kusunoki interview:

So Mighty and Ray were created by Kusunoki specifically for the SegaSonic arcade game and intentionally designed to have the same proportions as Sonic.

So the Naoto Ohshima illustration definitely came later, around the Chaotix era. The effort to distinguish the arcade duo from Sonic (new shoes, tall Mighty, squat Ray) was an update, not the original design. Vector would also have received his new shoes around the same time (both Sonic Band Vector and Hat, Shades & Tie Vector wore Sonic's shoes).

 

That reinforces the theory that the image shared by Ohshima reflects an early planned roster for Chaotix. Not just because it's from the Chaotix era, but also because why would they have Ohshima redesign Mighty and Ray if they weren't planning to use them again?

As for Charmy, I'm not sure I would call game!Charmy and manga!Charmy the same character, seeing how they're so different. I've always considered the manga versions of Amy and Charmy to be prototypes of sorts, and their game counterparts to be (mostly) original characters that were loosely based on them.

 

We're missing like, 97% of the manga. It ran through five different monthly anthologies (magazines aimed at Second Grade, Third Grade, Fourth Grade (illustrated prose), Fifth Grade and Sixth Grade) and the bimonthly Bessatsu CoroCoro Comic Special, as well as seasonal specials (apparently). For the most part each of these magazines seemed to do their own thing.

You're probably thinking of the Charmy and Amy as drawn by Sango Morimoto, who worked on Shogaku Ninensei (the Second Grader magazine), which debuted the series. Other artists drew Amy and Charmy a LOT more on model with what would later be seen in the games:



Hoshino confirmed that Sega's design team were involved in the creation of the manga characters. The recently discovered Sega concept art for the manga characters is very different from Sango Morimoto's renditions, even for characters like the bully, Anton.

It's tough to say whether Morimoto's were "off" looking because his manga was the first published and the designs hadn't been fully nailed down yet, or if he was simply going off model of his own accord. All of the artists drew Dr. Eggman off-model to an extent, so the latter is very possible.

Hoshino has also mentioned that a lot of people had input on Amy's design, including editors for the manga.

 

Thanks for all that info. Didn't the manga redesign Amy and Charmy to look closer to the game designs after the debuts of their game counterparts, though?

 

No. That Amy is from 1992, and I'm pretty sure the Charmy image is too. The series ended in 1994, Chaotix wasn't released until 1995.

 

Oh. In that case, I stand corrected. They weren't that different in the manga, so it's fair to call them the same characters. Now I wish we had scans of the full manga to look at their whole evolution, and see if there were any other game characters that were introduced that were first introduced in it.

 

...The one with the horns...? I don't recall any horned Sonic character ( except Espio but I wouldn't call it "the one with the horns")

 

It's Espio. The book notes that the comparison screens the interviewer showed him were from this URL: http://www.nintendoplayer.com/unreleased/sonic-crackers/

 

More info (from GDC 2018) about why Sonic became a hedgehog instead of some other animal.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-03-22-sonic-the-hedgehog-was-almost-designed-to-look-like-arch-nemesis-eggman

 

It's an interesting read, some of it doesn't quite make sense though. It says that a hedgehog was chosen because "it would transcend race, gender, ..." despite the fact Sonic is explicitly male. I always assumed it was more to do with Naka-san's engine which used ball-like physics, which obviously fits well with hedgehogs.

 

Didn't he mean that men and women would like hedgehogs equally ?

 

Yeah even if they "GENDERED" Sonic I think the idea was girls would look at an abstract shape animal and not dissociate any more than young boys playing the game, thus putting everyone on equal footing. Calling him "him" probably came second to calling the character in front of them "sonic," some strange animal creature whos species they barely heard of before then.

 

Heh. Imagine if they had gone with proto-Eggman as the main character and they had tried to make him cool.
And wow, they were even planning to have proto-Eggman curl up into a ball and roll around. I'd love to see such an interpretation.

The "What does it mean to be cool" photo is a bit too small, making the text in the blue box hard to read. I think the second and third points say the following:
* Will do anything for the sake of what matters to him
* Doesn't fight under someone else's definition of what's right
Does anyone know what the first one says? The last words seem to be "of unintentional logic", and the first one is perhaps "Actions" (unsure), but I can't make out the rest.

I like how most of the personality traits mentioned in the "cool" and "key words" screens seem to be in line with Sonic's characterization in later games. Nice to see that they stayed so faithful to his character when the series went 3d.

Edit: Derp, you can see larger versions of the photos by clicking them. I didn't realize this because my browser's script blocker was preventing the feature from working :v: