Development History - Sonic Boom

[Wulfsbane]

TSSZ has been chronicling the beginnings of Sonic Boom and how it changed throughout development.

Today, they revealed that Boom was supposed to be Sonic Origins

Here's some of the big notes from the article:

Storyline wise, it revolved about Sonic origins: Sonic and a young Eggman were close friends, but during a time travel sequence Eggman messes with something at the past, breaking their friendship.  Ancients were very important in this storyline, because they were related with Sonic’s origins. Eggman was once planned as a playable character but it was discarded. Tentative title for this was “Sonic Origins”

Storyline wise, they made them discard the Sonic origins storyline as SEGA denied it, due to them planning to tell Sonic origins in the future ( or at least, that is what they told Big Red Button.)

One of their main goals was to create an organic and natural looking environment for Sonic, using handmade textures for a cartoonish look. It was not rejected, but result is poor at the final game because of Wii U’s lower capabilities.

TV show also helped destroy their original idea. A designer pitched Sega the idea of a Sonic Tv Show. It was unrelated to the game, but 8 months before the game launch SEGA gave total control to the show team to change the game, making big changes to the storyline and making Knuckles dumb. They also asked for a richer universe with lots of characters that were totally absent in the series, along with filler cutscenes and levels due to the storyline change. No info on the previous storyline was revealed, except that ancients had a huge importance there.

[Mike Arcade]

http://www.tssznews.com/2017/07/11/tons-of-new-info-on-sonic-boom-rise-of-lyric-development-found/imagen8/

Here's Knuckles Apollo Design before taking in Sonic Team's suggestions, Wulfsbane I cannot stress how amazing this find is it's wonderful...yet it's very sad to see how this project ended up.

Seeing how things went for Big Red Button, I feel very sorry for them as this was their first project after many of them separated from Naughty Dog only to get screwed over by Sega and Sonic Team, effectively destroying them as devs resulting in the devs disbanded. This might be one of the worst things Sega and Sonic Team has ever done and on par with what happened with Chris Senn and his team regarding Sonic X-treme, who ironically enough was brought on board to work on the game.

[WarTraveller]

So we went from the origins to our childhood icon... to "BOUNCE PAD. I LOVE RINGS. HERE'S A BOUNCE PAD. YOU CAN NEVER HAVE TOO MANY RINGS."

Depressing.

[F07E]

yep, just gotta love that executive meddling right!?

seriously it sounds like the same story as bungies destiny, which ironically came out the same year.

[TheRedStranger]

Broadened topic to include the beginning, middle, and end of Boom. 

[Nagol]

Guy cusses like a sailor but I found an interesting youtube video about the history of Sonic Boom. The man who owns the video claims he knew a guy who knew a guy who owned a rare Sonic Boom art book. Kinda fishy but its full of legit facts. Check them out for yourself and think about what could have been. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSeceCfCJ8I

[MoKat]

Cool. Seems like some of that info.& images came from this page - Sonic Paradise.

Site is in Spanish, so you might need to run it thru a translator if you don't know Spanish very well.

[Mike Arcade]

@NagolThank you for sharing this video, ever since the show ended it seems as if Sonic Boom has fallen off the radar for a lot of fans. I do remember seeing a majority of that concept art before such as the Young Eggman and such.

There was also some of a completely different Sonic design to look a bit more like a legit Hedgehog, and while I do like the more US looking Boom Sonic, it's hard to get Sega to agree to anything too unique or different for Sonic. Any other series is fine, but not Sonic.

[Nagol]

4 hours ago, Mike Arcade said:

@NagolThank you for sharing this video, ever since the show ended it seems as if Sonic Boom has fallen off the radar for a lot of fans. I do remember seeing a majority of that concept art before such as the Young Eggman and such.

There was also some of a completely different Sonic design to look a bit more like a legit Hedgehog, and while I do like the more US looking Boom Sonic, it's hard to get Sega to agree to anything too unique or different for Sonic. Any other series is fine, but not Sonic.

What I got out of the video was that Sonic Team basically had to swoop in and be like "Yeah no don't use that design. Use ours." lol

[Mike Arcade]

5 hours ago, Nagol said:

What I got out of the video was that Sonic Team basically had to swoop in and be like "Yeah no don't use that design. Use ours." lol

That's why the series as a whole hasn't grown as much as it should.

Can't do anything too different I guess.

[TheRedStranger]

On 9/30/2021 at 8:16 AM, Mike Arcade said:

That's why the series as a whole hasn't grown as much as it should.

Can't do anything too different I guess.

Makes you wonder what would have happened if it was never meddled therewith.