Interviews// 'OutRun With Weapons': Sumo on Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing Transformed

Sumo Digital must be the happiest campers on the planet right now. The charismatic British studio is a melting pot of creative talent that happens to contain massive fans of SEGA’s back catalogue.

Over the last decade, it has been trusted with many of the Japanese publisher’s licenses. From its Xbox and PS2 ports of OutRun 2 to SEGA Superstars Tennis, it has proven that it can offer spinoff experiences that last.

Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing was a smash hit when it was released on Wii, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo DS back in 2010 - so much so that just two years on we’re going to be seeing a sequel in the form of Sonic & All-Stars Racing: Transformed. For design director Gareth Wilson - who previously worked with Bizarre Creations on Blur and Project Gotham - it’s a dream come true.

Before my interview with Gareth even begins, we’re talking about a certain headlining blue hedgehog. A rather deep conversation ensues about the reach of Sonic the Hedgehog as a character, and whether interest in the fanbase is shrinking or growing. Perhaps it’s not so surprising that a sequel to All-Stars Racing has come so soon - Gareth tells me that his five-year-old daughter knew Sonic before he even showed her the games. And it was thanks to Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games.

“Kids of a certain age always tend to have (SEGA Superstars) Tennis or All-Stars Racing kicking about in their game collections, but not so much the core Sonic titles,” Gareth explained. It seems that there is a pretty substantial benefit to allow the blue blur - and indeed, other SEGA properties - to freely explore other genres of games.

From here, we officially kicked off the interview, and spoke of broad-ranging topics such as the process in securing characters for the All-Stars Racing games, the burden of being compared to Mario Kart, and the creative freedom that Sumo has in working with the SEGA licenses. Read on...


SPOnG: Did you expect that you guys were going to be making a sequel to Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing at all?

Gareth Wilson: I’ve not been at Sumo Digital for very long, so I didn’t work on the original title. This is my first project at the studio. I was at Bizarre Creations before this, so I worked on Blur and Project Gotham Racing 2, 3 and 4... then Bizarre died, and I went to Sumo as they were looking for a Design Director. This is my first retail game so I don’t really have that much knowledge into how the process went before.

I think what happened though, was that the studio wasn’t expecting to make a sequel to All-Stars Racing this quickly. But the game sold extremely well, and SEGA was like, ‘Huh. Maybe we can make another version in this generation then.’ I think they always planned to do a sequel, but maybe on the next generation of consoles.

So we ended up doing some other bits and pieces for them. We did SEGA Rally, some XBLA games and the iPhone version of ASR, which did really really well. I was really pleased with that, actually.


SPOnG: I heard a lot of good things about that version of the game.

Gareth Wilson: I was just pleased with the fact that the handling - the actual controls - were alright. My pet hate with iPhone racing games is that they’re just crap to handle. Whereas I felt we did a pretty good job with the gyroscopic controls - at least, as best as I thought we could with tilt controls.


SPOnG: Was it difficult, for that particular version?

Gareth Wilson: Yeah. It was really hard to get those controls just right.


SPOnG: It’s just that you see so many apps out there that are happy to provide wonky car handling because the tilt controls are considered enough when it comes to immersion.

Gareth Wilson: What we had to do, was we had to use the AI information to help us program the steering correctly, basically.


SPOnG: You mean as a test bed? To see how the AI got to grips with the controls?

Gareth Wilson: No - when you’re driving around in that game, when you tilt left and right, we look at where the AI spline is and we go ‘Oh, what he means is, he wants this much steering.’ So we assist the player’s steering using the AI data. Because you just can’t be precise with that tilting thing, like you can with a thumbstick. It took a lot of fannying around to get right, basically. But yeah, we were really pleased with that. That was my first game with Sumo.

And then we did the arcade version of ASR. I’m not sure if you’ve been able to play that at all...


SPOnG: I did, but in Japan.

Gareth Wilson: I'm well pleased with that! It was a badass conversion. We didn’t really do that much on it, to be honest with you, but just having the cabinets and hardware there was brilliant.


SPOnG: Do you know if the arcade version of ASR did particularly well? There’s a stigma about arcade games performing pretty poorly in terms of sales, at least outside of Japan.

Gareth Wilson: Not at SEGA. Their arcade division is very profitable.


SPOnG: Oh, fantastic. Would you be able to tell if ASR was among one of the big sellers in SEGA’s lineup of arcade cabinets?

Gareth Wilson: I don’t know, but we’ve only heard good things. I’m not really privy to how much we’ve sold, but they were very pleased with it. And it’s gone into loads of shopping malls, cinemas and outlets all over the place.


SPOnG: Do you think you’d do an arcade version of All-Stars Racing: Transformed?

Gareth Wilson: I’d love to, but I don’t know if we ever will do. But yeah, it’d be great.