Team Sonic's Pain at Boom Design

Poor, poor Takashi Iizuka of Sonic Team. He's a respected chap. But he's obviously very, very close to his art (designing Sonic the Hedgehog games) and is therefore easily traumatised by changes to his love.

According to Bob Rafei of game dev team Big Red Button, which created the frankly adulterated Sonic Boom that we looked at recently courtesty of Sonic Stadium and former SPOnG writer Svend, Iizuka was traumatised by the mere sight of the designs.

Rafei told Gamespot, "Early on, when we had our first review of all the crazy things we wanted to try, Iizuka-san came down to Los Angeles and looked through all the different concepts.

"I felt sorry for the guy because sometimes he couldn't actually look at the screen--it was too traumatic seeing all the crazy stuff we wanted to do. Over the course of that meeting, when we were coming up with new ideas, we had a very sincere--just two adults talking--conversation about why a character should or should not wear pants, and that was a very surreal moment in my life and my career.

"But it helped us understand the rules of clothing in this universe. Any small adjustment went a very long way, so we had to be very careful."



Read Svend's take on Sonic Boom here.