Sonic Team is named after its first hit. The staff roll of Sonic the Hedgehog in 1991 was headed “Sonic Team Staff”, and the group of about 15 people who made the game kept the name. For the next fifteen years, under the programmer Yuji Naka, it was one of Sega’s best-known development teams, and it made far more than the hedgehog’s games: a dream-flying game for the Saturn, a firefighting game, a puzzle game about mice and rockets, and Phantasy Star Online, which put Dreamcast owners around the world into the same role-playing game over the internet. The name has outlasted almost all of its founders. Sonic Team still makes the Sonic games today.
Fast facts
- Parent: Sega. A department inside Sega, except from 2000 to 2004, when it was a separate company, SONICTEAM Ltd, owned by Sega.
- Founding members: Yuji Naka (programmer), Naoto Ohshima (character designer) and Hirokazu Yasuhara (game planner), from Sega’s AM8 department.
- Heads: Yuji Naka, who was producer and, from 2000, chief executive, until he left in 2006; later Takashi Iizuka.
- Known for: the Sonic the Hedgehog series; NiGHTS into Dreams (1996); Burning Rangers (1998); ChuChu Rocket! (1999); Samba de Amigo (1999); Phantasy Star Online (2000).
- Offshoot: Sonic Team USA, San Francisco, from 1999; renamed Sega Studios USA in 2004.
- Merger: absorbed United Game Artists in 2003.
The team behind the hedgehog
The three people at the centre had met in Sega’s AM8 department. Naka, who had been turned down by Namco for lack of a degree, according to Retro Gamer, had joined Sega in the mid-1980s, programmed Master System and Mega Drive conversions such as Out Run and Ghouls ’n Ghosts, and worked with Ohshima on Phantasy Star II. Ohshima designed Sonic, Naka programmed him and Yasuhara planned the game and laid out its levels. The Sonic the Hedgehog entry tells how the game was made.
Success split the team up. Naka, unhappy with a pay system that rewarded seniority, left for California, where Mark Cerny’s Sega Technical Institute made Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles with him and Yasuhara. Ohshima stayed in Japan and led Sonic CD on the Mega-CD. The Sonic Team name lived on over those years mainly on Japanese packaging. Naka went back to Japan in 1994 as a producer, and with Ohshima started the name up again for a new department. Years later Naka still gave Yasuhara credit: “Even now, we call the enemy layout of the traditional Sonic ‘the Yasuhara Setting’,” he told Retro Gamer.
NiGHTS and the Saturn
The first game of the new team was not a Sonic game. After Sonic & Knuckles, Naka told Edge in 1996, the team held “a brain storming session which lasted six months”, and development began in about April 1995. “It would have been easier to use Sonic,” he said, “but we thought that people were expecting more, so we created a new character and a new world.” In NiGHTS into Dreams (1996) the player takes one of two children into their dreams and flies as the figure NiGHTS, swooping through rings to collect gems against a time limit. Naka was its executive producer, Ohshima its director and character designer, and Takashi Iizuka, who had worked on Sonic 3, its game designer. Ohshima told Edge that he designed NiGHTS as “a character similar to an angel”, “a conscious effort to create somebody who would contrast with Sonic”.
Because the standard Saturn pad could not handle the flying, the team designed an analogue controller to ship with the game, a “fattened” Saturn pad with a thumb-stick above the digital pad. It was not the first analogue controller for a home console; the analogue control entry follows that history. NiGHTS was admired more than it was bought: Retro Gamer judged that it “did not shift Saturn units in the same way that Sonic shifted 16-bit hardware”. The team’s other Saturn game, the 3D firefighting action game Burning Rangers, came out in 1998, near the end of the machine’s life.
Sonic Adventure and the Dreamcast
Sonic returned on Sega’s next console. Sonic Adventure, the first full 3D Sonic game, was due in Japan on 23 December 1998, a few weeks after the Dreamcast itself. Retro Gamer credits the idea to Iizuka, who had long wanted to make a Sonic role-playing game. Naka no longer led the programming, and after the game Ohshima left Sega to co-found a new studio, Artoon. “I’m sorry to say that we lost a main member of Sonic Team when Ohshima-san decided to leave,” Naka told Retro Gamer, “but we continue to create products that use his original ideas.” In 1999 about a dozen of the team, led by Iizuka, moved to San Francisco as Sonic Team USA to prepare Sonic Adventure for the West, and stayed to make Sonic Adventure 2 (2001).
Going online
The Dreamcast had a modem, and Sonic Team was given the job of using it. According to Sega Retro, Sega’s chairman, Isao Okawa, wanted a fully online game, and Sonic Team was the team with staff free to make one. “ChuChu Rocket was positioned as an important title for Sonic Team and was one of the main initiatives in our effort toward online gaming,” Naka told Retro Gamer. The 1999 puzzle game, a cat-and-mouse contest in which players guide mice into rockets, was later given away free to bring Dreamcast owners online. The team also made Samba de Amigo (1999), a rhythm game played by shaking maraca controllers, first for arcades and then for the Dreamcast.
Phantasy Star Online was the big one. It turned Sega’s 1980s role-playing series into a game in which up to four players, from different countries, explored and fought together over the internet, with a word-select system to translate their messages. Edge reported in December 2000 that “should everything go according to plan, it will be the first of its kind on any console”, and that it was due in Japan on 21 December. Naka, by then chief executive of Sonic Team, told the magazine that the translation system had been “a nightmare for us”, because of French and Spanish grammar. On sales he was cautious: “One million. I mean, I’d like PSO to sell a million… but who knows. I know the US will be our main market.” A second Dreamcast version, Phantasy Star Online Ver. 2, followed in 2001, and later editions came out on the GameCube and Xbox.
A company of its own
In 2000 Sega broke its development departments up into separate companies, and the team became SONICTEAM Ltd. When Sega stopped making the Dreamcast in 2001, Sonic Team started making games for other companies’ machines, beginning with Nintendo’s. Sonic Adventure 2 was converted to the GameCube, and new games followed there, such as Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg (2003), as well as Sonic Heroes (2003) on the GameCube, PlayStation 2 and Xbox. The team also took over Puyo Puyo, the falling-block puzzle series whose creator, Compile, had collapsed.
Several of Sega’s smaller companies could not survive on their own. Retro Gamer describes SONICTEAM as “financially solvent”, and in 2003 it absorbed United Game Artists, Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s studio behind Space Channel 5 and Rez. The merged team’s Astro Boy for the PlayStation 2 (2004) showed, in Edge’s view, “little of the UGA spirit”. After the pachinko maker Sammy bought control of Sega, the separate companies were brought back into Sega in 2004. Sonic Team became a Sega department again, keeping its name, and Sonic Team USA became Sega Studios USA.
After Naka
On 8 May 2006 Naka announced that he was leaving to set up his own company, Prope, which Sega part-funded; Retro Gamer reported that ten or more of Sonic Team’s staff went with him. By then, the magazine wrote, the original line-up had “all but disbanded”. Iizuka’s American team was brought back to Japan in 2008, and Iizuka became the head of Sonic Team, overseeing the series from Sonic Colours and Sonic Generations (2011) to Sonic Frontiers (2022), which he called “a title that will determine the future of Sonic”. In 2024 the studio followed it with Sonic X Shadow Generations, a remaster of Sonic Generations.
Sources
- Sonic the Hedgehog (Sega, 1991), Mega Drive, in-game staff credits: “Sonic Team Staff”.
- Edge issue 35, August 1996, preview and p. 38: NiGHTS preview and interview with Yuji Naka (executive producer), Takashi Iizuka (game designer) and Naoto Ohshima (director): the brainstorming after Sonic & Knuckles, development from April 1995, the new character, Ohshima’s angel, the analogue pad shipping with the game.
- Edge issue 95, March 2001, pp. 8–9: Sega’s announcements of January 2001 and Sonic Team’s work for Nintendo hardware.
- Edge issue 66, Christmas 1998: Sonic Adventure moved to 23 December.
- Edge issue 92, Christmas 2000, from p. 50: Phantasy Star Online and interview with Yuji Naka as “CEO of Sonic Team” (the four-player online role-playing game, “the first of its kind on any console”, the translation system, “One million”, release 21 December in Japan).
- DC-UK issue 16, December 2000: “Sonic Team chief Yuji Naka” presenting Phantasy Star Online in Tokyo.
- Edge issue 136, May 2004, p. 104: Astro Boy review (Sonic Team; UGA’s merger into Sonic Team; “little of the UGA spirit”).
- Retro Gamer issue 26, 2006, pp. 24–28: Sean Smith, “Company profile: Sonic Team”, with interview with Yuji Naka (AM8; the group of 15; Naka’s career and Namco; Naka and Yasuhara at Sega Technical Institute; Naka’s return in 1994; “the Yasuhara Setting”; NiGHTS and Burning Rangers; Iizuka and Sonic Adventure; Sonic Team USA; Ohshima and Artoon; ChuChu Rocket!, Samba de Amigo and Phantasy Star Online; SONICTEAM Ltd in 2000, the absorption of UGA in 2003 and the return to Sega in 2004; Sega Studios USA; Naka’s departure to Prope on 8 May 2006).
- Sega Retro, “Sonic Team”, “Sonic Team (company)”, “Sonic Team USA” and “Takashi Iizuka” (web, secondary): the name on Japanese packaging in 1992–94 and its revival for NiGHTS; Sega chairman Isao Okawa’s request for an online game; the demise of Compile; the company from 2000 to 2004; Phantasy Star Online Ver. 2, Billy Hatcher, Sonic Heroes and the Puyo Pop games; Sonic Team USA from 1999; Iizuka’s return from the US in 2008 and his role as head of Sonic Team. https://segaretro.org/Sonic_Team
- Wikipedia, “Sonic Team” (web, secondary): Sonic Frontiers (2022) and the studio’s place inside Sega. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_Team
- Video Games Chronicle, “Interview: Sonic Team on how looking back helped Sonic move forwards”, 11 September 2024 (web, secondary): Takashi Iizuka as head of Sonic Team; Sonic Generations (2011) and Sonic X Shadow Generations. https://www.videogameschronicle.com/features/interviews/interview-sonic-team-on-how-looking-back-helped-sonic-move-forwards/
- The Sonic Stadium, “Takashi Iizuka Calls Sonic Frontiers ‘A Title That Will Determine The Future of Sonic’” (web, secondary). https://www.sonicstadium.org/articles/sonic/takashi-iizuka-calls-sonic-frontiers-a-title-that-will-determine-the-future-of-sonic-r3687/