Sonic Adventure 2 ended up changing the future of the Sonic series, but apparently it all started with just 11 developers packing their bags and moving to America.
Takashi Iizuka, Kazuyuki Hoshino and Jun Senoue have been looking back on the development of the Dreamcast classic as part of a special Sonic 35th Anniversary roundtable published in CONTINUE Vol.90, and the trio shared some fascinating details about just how much the decision to develop the game in the US ended up shaping what Sonic Adventure 2 became.
Following the completion of the first Sonic Adventure, Iizuka said he wanted to dramatically change the development environment for its sequel. He believed that if Sonic Team was going to make another Sonic game, bringing some of the atmosphere of America into it would be important, so he pushed his superiors to let the team develop the project there.
There was just one rather significant problem: hardly anybody went with him.
According to Iizuka, Sonic Team asked for staff who were able to relocate to America, with only 11 people ultimately making the move and establishing the new studio.
And SEGA had already decided what they were going to make.
“The company gave us a strict order: ‘If you’re going to America, you absolutely have to develop Sonic Adventure 2.’ But there was no way we could make a game with 11 people, right? (laughs) Still, at the time we took it on with a lot of passion and went to America.”
The studio would gradually grow as more people joined locally, but Iizuka remembers those early days fondly. With such a small team, everyone knew what problems the project was facing and could freely exchange ideas about how to solve them.
Hoshino also remembers Sonic Adventure 2 as an especially important period in his own life. He had recently married when he moved to America, and described beginning his newlywed life in an unfamiliar country, eventually starting a family there while development continued.
But moving Sonic Team across the Pacific did much more than simply change where everyone went to work.
It directly changed the game.
Hoshino explained that living in America naturally made the developers want to incorporate things they were seeing around them into Sonic Adventure 2. One of those things was a gameplay mechanic that would go on to become a permanent part of Sonic’s 3D adventures: rail grinding.
“When you live over there, you want to bring what you see locally into the game. For example, there’s an action that has now become familiar in the Sonic series, sliding along grind rails.”
Hoshino says that mechanic was inspired by the street sports that were popular around San Francisco at the time, with Iizuka then incorporating the idea into Sonic Adventure 2.
Pretty significant considering Sonic has barely been able to look at a conveniently placed metal rail since without jumping on it.
And the American influence didn’t stop with Sonic’s moveset.
Jun Senoue joined the team in America around a year later, and says developing there helped make those kinds of ideas possible. On the music side, he had also been thinking about trying something different for the sequel: using vocals in the actual stage music.
That idea eventually collided rather spectacularly with City Escape.
Senoue says “Escape From the City” was selected for the game’s opening stage, allowing the team to make a particularly strong first impression from the moment Sonic hits the streets.
For him, City Escape effectively became the point where everything Sonic Team had gained from developing the game in America came together.
“I think the first stage of Sonic Adventure 2 condenses the results of what we created in America.”
It puts a slightly different perspective on what has become one of the most famous Sonic stages ever made. City Escape wasn’t simply dressed up to resemble an American city. The people building it were actually living there, absorbing the culture around them and feeding that experience back into the game.
The recently resurfaced original City Escape design documents already gave us an unusually detailed look at how Sonic Team planned the stage itself, including its downhill opening and GUN truck chase. This new discussion fills in some of the story behind why Sonic Adventure 2 ended up taking this particular direction in the first place.
And looking back 25 years later, Iizuka doesn’t seem to have much doubt about how important that decision was.
“If we had made it in Japan, I don’t think it would have become this kind of game. It became a game that changed the future of the Sonic series, and it also became a title that changed the destinies of the people involved with it.”
Considering Sonic Adventure 2 gave us Shadow the Hedgehog, made grinding a recurring part of Sonic’s moveset and produced the likes of City Escape and “Escape From the City,” it’s difficult to argue that the series didn’t look rather different after those 11 developers decided to take SEGA up on its offer and head to America.
Not bad for a team that, by Iizuka’s own admission, was far too small to make the game it had just been ordered to make.
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