1. Iizuka says that Sonic Team wants to build a new internal standard for its products, giving the team the necessary resources to craft something that lives up to fans’ expectations.
“When you buy a Sonic game, we want you to see that Sega logo on the package and know that you’re getting a great experience,” he says. “Ideally, I want Sonic to be a character loved both by people who play games and by those who don’t.”
Part of that overall plan? Expansion:
To achieve this, Iizuka says Sonic Team needs to keep the franchise expanding, pushing Sonic further into other medias such as television, movies and merchandising, as well as expanding on the types of games Sonic appears in. It also means keeping the character a “nostalgic icon of [fans’] childhood.”
“I want to make him a character who continues to be iconic and remains relevant as one of the first cool characters a child might see,” Iizuka says.
2. In July of 2015, Haruki Satomi, the CEO of Sega Games, said in an interview with Weekly Famitsu magazine that the Sega games released in the previous 10 years “partially betrayed” the trust of the company’s longtime fans. He also stated that the company would “like to win back the customers’ trust and become a brand once again.”
Iizuka tells Polygon he hopes Sonic games will be a part of the solution by putting a greater emphasis on quality.
3. “Because [Rise of Lyric] tried a different take on Sonic from the norm — and considering the results — this made Sonic Team feel that we want to build a Sonic title which represents the evolution of the Sonic series over the last 20 years,” Iizuka says on what future Sonic games may look like.
Iizuka continued by saying that Sonic Team thinks evolution and improving upon themselves should be what the games should be open to:
“we do think that the games should always be open to evolving and constantly improving themselves,” he says. “We use our Sonic Team logo as a brand for those titles that we feel confident in, and though Sonic has evolved and changed much in terms of gameplay as we found what worked best, we want to keep creating good games so that Sonic Team’s logo will always stand as a mark of quality.”
4. Iizuka does not wash his hands completely of Sega’s problems. He cites Rise of Lyric, explaining how priority was put into shipping the title rather than quality and fan expectation. He also admits that Sonic Team wasn’t “deeply involved” with the game’s development.
If you thought that the company wasn’t listening, there was some remarks made about this:
Iizuka brings up Rise of Lyric several times in his interview with Polygon. Criticism of the game from fans and media alike has taken a toll on the company, he says, and it isn’t eager to make the same mistake twice.
