King Boom Boo’s sunglasses in Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds were not just added because someone at Sonic Team thought the giant ghost needed a little more style.
Apparently, he actually needed them.
Sonic Channel’s latest Sonic Team Staff Introduction profiles Hiroyuki Watanabe, Lead Character Artist on Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, revealing several new development details surrounding some of the game’s enormous creatures and environmental characters.
Watanabe’s history with Sonic Team actually goes all the way back to the original Sonic Adventure. His first work for the studio included Froggy, Big the Cat’s perpetually troublesome companion, and variations of the Chao. He later contributed to titles including Samba de Amigo, Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg and Sonic and the Secret Rings before working on children’s games, rhythm titles and other arcade projects, eventually returning to Sonic Team for CrossWorlds.
His current role has put him behind some of the biggest things players encounter in the game.
Watanabe handled both design and modeling for the dinosaur, Kraken, giant flower and the refinement of King Boom Boo, meaning several creatures that might look like part of the scenery are actually character-art responsibilities.
The biggest revelation concerns King Boom Boo, whose return almost came with a considerably more dramatic redesign.
Watanabe initially proposed giving the Sonic Adventure 2 boss a crown, cape and staff, leaning much harder into the “King” part of King Boom Boo. That idea was ultimately rejected, with the team deciding to keep the character closer to his familiar appearance instead.
That created another problem.
King Boom Boo is famously vulnerable to sunlight, yet CrossWorlds needed him to appear across a variety of courses, including locations where hiding from the sun would not exactly be an option.
The solution was wonderfully simple:
Give him sunglasses.
According to Sonic Channel, the idea essentially came from asking how King Boom Boo could counter the sun, with sunglasses providing the answer. Watanabe then created the funky Wellington-style shades seen on the character in the finished game.
So yes, there is actually lore behind the sunglasses.
Sonic City previously highlighted the sunglasses-wearing King Boom Boo when players discovered just how terrifying it could be to hold first place during the CrossWorlds network test. The ghost specifically targets the leader, joining several items capable of turning a comfortable lead into complete chaos.
What we did not know at the time was why he had suddenly developed such impeccable taste in eyewear.
Watanabe’s work on the game’s gigantic dinosaur presented a very different challenge.
Its body is so enormous that its back effectively becomes part of the racetrack, forcing Watanabe to think about the creature as both a character and a playable environment. He says particular care was taken to make sure racers could still perceive realistic surface texture while driving directly across its body.
The result was something Watanabe described as feeling “closer to background production than character production.”
That gives us some extra context for an idea we previously highlighted in our translation of a CrossWorlds developer interview with producer Ryuichi Taki and creative director Masaru Kohayakawa.
During that interview, Taki recalled how the development team threw around ideas intended to make races feel constantly surprising, including the simple question:
What if a giant dinosaur suddenly appeared?
That ultimately became much more than a background spectacle.
The Kraken was created with a similar philosophy.
Watanabe explains that the game’s giant enemies were designed while keeping the established visual language of Sonic-series enemies in mind, but the team also wanted them to genuinely surprise players when they suddenly appeared during races.
Considering how aggressively CrossWorlds likes throwing completely different environments and hazards at players, subtlety probably was not part of the assignment.
Another of Watanabe’s particularly difficult creations can be found in White Cave, the returning Sonic Riders-inspired course.
The stage features an enormous flower designed so that its shape and coloring would blend naturally into White Cave’s existing environment rather than look like an unrelated creature dropped into the course.
The difficult part was making it bloom.
The flower begins in a closed-bud state before dramatically opening during the race, and Watanabe says creating that transformation proved particularly challenging. Sonic Channel even encourages players to pass the area in first place so they can properly catch the moment it opens.
White Cave itself was one of the earliest major Sonic Riders callbacks revealed for the game. We covered its return in May 2025 when SEGA showed Jet the Hawk racing through the revived course on Extreme Gear.
Nearly three decades separate CrossWorlds from Watanabe’s earliest Sonic Team work, but his career has apparently never been restricted to character modeling either.
He remembers Samba de Amigo as a particularly important project, where his responsibilities extended across background characters, stages, presentation, motion and visual effects.
And then somebody put him behind a microphone.
Watanabe also provided backing vocals for “VAMOS A CARNAVAL!”, giving him an unexpected musical credit alongside all of that visual work.
From helping create Froggy and Chao variations in Sonic Adventure to designing gigantic dinosaurs that double as racetracks nearly three decades later, Watanabe has had a remarkably varied history with Sonic Team.
And now we can add one more extremely important contribution to the list:
He helped explain how King Boom Boo survives daylight.
Turns out all he needed was a decent pair of shades.
Stay tuned to Sonic City for more Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds News and Updates!
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