SEGA Reveals Sonic x Fortnite Took Years to Make After Disagreement Over Sonic’s Proportions

Sonic the Hedgehog x Fortnite took years to make, and one of the biggest sticking points was exactly what you would expect after seeing Sonic standing next to a regular Fortnite character: his proportions.

SEGA president and COO Shuji Utsumi and Epic Games Japan representative Takayuki Kawasaki have opened up about the crossover in a new Famitsu interview, revealing that Epic had wanted Sonic in Fortnite since around the beginning of the game itself.

“We had wanted Sonic to appear in Fortnite someday ever since shortly after Fortnite began,” Kawasaki said, describing the relationship between the companies as something close to “mutual affection.”

The timing finally came together as SEGA approached Sonic’s 35th anniversary and began looking for things the franchise had never attempted during its first 35 years. Even then, this was not a collaboration put together over a few months.

“This wasn’t preparation on the scale of months. It took years,” Kawasaki said.

Epic was simultaneously working with numerous game companies for Fortnite Chapter 7 Season 4: Override, but Sonic presented a particularly obvious problem.

“With Sonic, there was the issue of his body shape, or rather, his proportions,” Utsumi explained.

SEGA liked the overall idea, but internally there were questions about whether simply placing Sonic into Fortnite in the proposed form was really the right way to handle him. Utsumi says Epic originally sent SEGA a sample showing how Sonic would look with the necessary proportions, and SEGA pushed back.

“Epic Games originally gave us a sample saying, ‘With these proportions, he would look something like this.’ But we also have very strong feelings about Sonic. We said things like, ‘No, rather than that, wouldn’t this kind of format be better?’ From there, we went back and forth many times.”

The objective was not to preserve Sonic’s normal proportions at all costs. Utsumi says SEGA accepted that the format had to change, but wanted the result to still feel natural and retain Sonic’s particular sense of coolness.

“Even if the format was changing, we wanted him to look natural to a certain extent, and we wanted him to retain Sonic’s particular coolness. We were very particular about that.”

That discussion eventually expanded far beyond the model itself.

SEGA and Epic developed an actual explanation for why Sonic would exist in the Fortnite world with a different body, then incorporated that explanation into the crossover comic released around the collaboration.

“It wasn’t only about making Sonic’s appearance in the game better,” Utsumi said. “We thought through the setting, including why Sonic exists in this world in that form, properly prepared a story people could accept, and then had that drawn as a comic.”

That fills in another part of the story behind Android Sonic. Sonic City previously reported Takashi Iizuka’s explanation that the real Sonic would never use a gun, making an artificial counterpart a way to let players participate fully in Fortnite without changing Sonic himself.

The negotiations were apparently not always easy either, despite both companies wanting the collaboration.

“Respecting each other doesn’t mean the discussions are easy,” Utsumi said. “We exchanged different opinions and had repeated, thorough discussions before getting this far.”

Kawasaki similarly explained that Epic has developers and engineers who grew up with Sonic and entered the games industry partly because of games like it. Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney is apparently a particularly big Sonic fan. Kawasaki recalled Utsumi giving Sweeney a Sonic plush during an event in Tokyo last November, after which Sweeney kept it with him so nobody else could take it.

That attention also carried into the gameplay. Utsumi praised Epic for building Sonic-specific movement and stages into Fortnite, while Kawasaki pointed to Green Hill, loops and the Spin Attack as examples intended to make longtime fans feel they were genuinely playing something Sonic-related rather than simply using a Sonic costume.

And players have been using those features quite a lot.

Kawasaki revealed the first major performance figures for the crossover, covering roughly its first three days.

“During the first weekend alone, players around the world collected more than 1.5 billion Rings, and Dr. Eggman was defeated more than 14 million times. That isn’t two weeks. Those are numbers from roughly the first three days.”

Utsumi’s immediate response was simply: “Those are incredible numbers…”

Kawasaki then joked that, since Eggman is the villain, players apparently have no hesitation about beating him up.

SEGA is seeing an impact beyond the raw Fortnite statistics as well.

“For us, having people play Sonic through Fortnite has led to a new expansion of the Sonic fanbase,” Utsumi said. “We’re actually seeing Sonic-related results in the numbers that have exceeded our expectations.”

And this may not be the end of SEGA characters appearing in Fortnite.

Asked directly about expanding the relationship to other SEGA properties, Kawasaki said there is “definitely” potential for more.

“We’ve been talking for some time about wanting to increase the opportunities for people to encounter more SEGA character IP within Fortnite, so I hope those opportunities continue to grow.”

Utsumi agreed, although he stressed that future crossovers should preserve what makes the original property recognizable and fun rather than simply placing a character into another game for the sake of it.

The two companies are also working together outside Fortnite. Kawasaki pointed to Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds using Unreal Engine and said SEGA and Epic are collaborating behind the scenes on development infrastructure, online services and other tools.

Utsumi then revealed that several SEGA projects using Unreal Engine are currently underway.

“There are several projects moving forward using Unreal Engine,” Utsumi said. “With that in mind, we’d like to continue an even broader collaboration with Epic Games.”

He did not identify those projects or say that they are Sonic games.

Utsumi also said “various discussions related to transmedia are currently moving forward” around Sonic, mentioning film, SEGA Store merchandise, brand collaborations and potentially location-based projects as examples of the wider directions SEGA is exploring. No specific new Sonic production was announced.

After years of negotiations, repeated revisions to Sonic’s body, an entire story explaining why Android Sonic exists and more than 1.5 billion Rings collected in three days, this was clearly never going to be a simple character-skin deal.

And judging by SEGA and Epic’s comments, they are not particularly interested in making the next collaboration simple either.

Stay tuned to Sonic City for more Sonic x Fortnite News and Updates!