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

SPOnG: On the disc, as well - it was suggested that, like SEGA Superstars Tennis before it, that there were characters and stages planned for the disc that got cut. Do you think that, now you’ve proven yourselves with the first ASR, that it’s easier to work with SEGA in terms of licensing characters?

Gareth Wilson: They’ve never really been difficult to work with at all. It’s lucky for me, because I’m coming in to a team which has got five or six years experience of working with SEGA. There’s already these relationships in place. They very rarely... I can’t remember them saying, ‘you can’t have that character.’ Certainly on this game, I don’t remember them saying that at all.

They’re pretty good to work with. The tricky thing is that each character is owned by a different person in SEGA. So, it would be much more helpful for us if it was just one person who was approving everything. But in Japan - or at least within SEGA - if you create a character, you kind of own that character forever.

So the original person who created Ulala (Tetsuya Mizuguchi) is forever the holder of Ulala and has the final say on everything related to that character. That’s how it works, so we have to work with individual people... and quite a lot of them are from Sonic Team. Like, Billy Hatcher is a Sonic Team character, so that’s one person we need to go to for any Sonic Team character or game. So that’s not too bad.

But, I dunno, something like Golden Axe is a very different story. You have to go and find out who created that, or who created Daytona, or whatever.


SPOnG: ...or ToeJam and Earl.

Gareth Wilson: ToeJam and Earl [laughs]! That was an interesting one. Again, this was way before my time, but if I remember rightly, ToeJam and Earl was a guy who... I don’t even think the game or characters were owned by SEGA. It was some sort of weird...


SPOnG: Yeah, as far as I remember, the reason even the old classic Mega Drive ToeJam and Earl games didn’t make it on the recent Xbox 360 and PS3 compilations was because it all came down to this one guy who won’t give SEGA permission. I’m guessing there are similar limitations that prevent you from getting certain characters?

Gareth Wilson: There are some, yeah. There are some which are just legally impossible. Like, Wonder Boy. Wonder Boy is owned by Hudson, the arcade company. But Hudson have gone bust recently, I think.


SPOnG: I thought it got swallowed up by Konami, but I imagine that would be pretty much the same thing in terms of getting agreements?

Gareth Wilson: Don’t know. Wonder Boy is an example of a character I would have loved to have done though. We could have done a really cool stone-age car like The Flintstones. But the ownership of him is so legally questionable... we don’t even really know who owns him. So including him could land SEGA with a load of litigation. We can’t really do him.

It’s funny really, because in Project Gotham Racing there were certain cars like that too. I remember once, there was this mad car called a Vector Wedge, or something, which we had found in this classic car history book. It was a drag racing car with three gears, but it looked like a sports car. We thought, ‘this is f***ing awesome, let’s get it in!’ And we just couldn’t find out who owned the rights to it, so we couldn’t do it.


SPOnG: I guess with characters, some of it is legality, and some of it is fan response too. There was the whole ‘Don’t Forget NiGHTS’ campaign online, which I’m sure you know all about...

Gareth Wilson: [Laughs] Yeah, Don’t Forget NiGHTS! Oh God, yeah [smiles].


SPOnG: I’m guessing you’re taking the appropriate and honourable response to that campaign by including...

Gareth Wilson: I cannot confirm nor deny whether NiGHTS is in this game [laughs].


SPOnG: [Laughs] Of course! I wanted to talk about the design of the stages in All-Stars Racing: Transformed, because the changing tracks and morphing landscapes is an interesting direction. How challenging was it to go ahead and open up these different stages?

Gareth Wilson: It’s been really hard. I would say the track design aspect of this project has been crazy. We’ve had to work out the vehicle handling for the boat, the vehicle handling for the plane, the vehicle handling for the car, and then build levels which fit all this in. It’s really, really tough and no-one’s ever done this before. I can see why, now [laughs]!

No-one’s done transforming vehicles - you know, Diddy Kong Racing has plane sections and boat sections, but it’s never been able to fit it into one space, one track. So that’s been really tough. But it’s also been great, because it means we’ve been able to add Panzer Dragoon, which probably didn’t make much sense as a pure driving track. But now we’ve got flight, we were able to include it.


SPOnG: Does it add an extra complication, in trying to keep to the license that you’re basing the stage from as well?

Gareth Wilson: It does. Some licenses don’t suit a particular surface type. So Super Monkey Ball wouldn’t really suit flight. To be honest, it doesn’t really suit water either. There’s no water in Super Monkey Ball. So we had to go and speak to Nagoshi-san - tell him that we wanted to put Super Monkey Ball in the game, but we needed to have at least two surface types to the stage. So we had to work with him on what water could look like in a Super Monkey Ball game.

It’s great to be working on all these games that I loved as a kid. It’s a really nice project to work on. And the team is great, everyone just gets on. Everyone’s very on board with what the game is. There’s very little questioning of the design of the game, or getting in moods or falling out. That just doesn’t happen, really.


SPOnG: I remember in the last All-Stars Racing game, you couldn’t perform an All-Star power up move in an online match.

Gareth Wilson: Oh, no - you can totally do that in this one.


SPOnG: How difficult was it to implement? I remember, for the last game it was apparently a case of netcode and lag for other players.

Gareth Wilson: Yeah. I didn’t work on the last game, so I don’t know why they couldn’t do it. But we made sure that we could do it from the start, this time around! It was strange to me that there were no All-Star moves in the online part of the game. I think what it was, was just that... there were just so many different All-Star moves, and they did so many different things, that making them all work in an online race was too difficult to do in the time they had. They ran out of time, more than anything I imagine.

In a lot of ways, it’s been easier for me, because the game’s already been designed. The concept of the game is already in place, whereas when developing the first ASR they didn’t even know if the characters were going to be in cars! They had no idea - it was a blank sheet of paper. In a similar way to Blur, we didn’t know what the game was, so we spent half the development time trying to work out what it was! Then we were like, ‘oh shit, we have to make the game in eight months!’ [Laughs]

So... yeah, it meant we were already on board with what the game was going to be, and everyone knew what it was. It was a case of getting the water and air sections in, improving the online experience and having a more interesting progression to the game.


SPOnG: Thanks a lot for your time!

Gareth Wilson: Thank you very much.