Sonic Adventure – 1999 Developer Interview

Yuji Naka – Producer
Takashi Iizuka – Director
Kazuyuki Hoshino – Director
Tetsu Katano – Main Programmer

—Having just finished the development of Sonic Adventure, please share your feelings in this moment.

Naka: Seriously though, we only finished it moments ago. (laughs) The timing was quite out of the ordinary... I would say we really pushed the deadline right up to the hilt, in a way that's not very common for this industry. I know it caused a lot of trouble for the sales and promotion teams at Sega, as well as all the gaming magazines. But we're finally done now. Despite all the rush, the mood at Sega was positive, with everyone determined to finish up in time for the promised December 23rd release date. To be honest, about two weeks ago I was skeptical if we were going to make it by the end of the year. (laughs) But everyone dug their heels in at the very end, and I think we've produced something wonderful, with no corners cut.

Sonic Adventure will be my 21st game, and of all the titles I've helped create over the years, I don't think I've ever put so much effort into making something so polished. It really will be something special, I believe. It's turned out to be a game I'm very confident in releasing, and I can't imagine anything better for the Dreamcast's launch title. If you recall, at our August press release we talked about Sonic Adventure being the "new future standard", and I think we've made something that lives up to those words.

—Of all the many elements that make up Sonic Adventure, what do you think is the most fun?

Naka: The gameplay, of course, is the foundation of any game, and that's the most important thing. We made sure that was solid, and on top of that, we added a huge variety of different gameplay—side content, I guess you could call it, and that's all very fleshed out. There's an upgraded version of the A-LIFE system from NiGHTS where you evolve Chao, for example. I think it's a lot of fun to collect all the Sonic Emblems as well.

—Looking back now, what were some of the big challenges you faced? There's the length of the development and the sheer volume, but as a producer, I think managing that many people must have been tough too.

Naka: Oh yeah. Just downstairs here, we've got over 100 people alone. But it's taken a team that large to accomplish something this interesting. Our entire team was composed of Sega's top-class employees, and it wasn't uncommon for them to be working on other projects at the same time as Sonic Adventure. Their competence meant that, as the development went on, they'd often undertake individual sections on their own; as a consequence of that, no one person could really see the whole picture of the development, and when the game was finally finished and they played it, it was like, "Ohhh… so that's what's going on here." (laughs) So in a way, it's a game that even the developers can enjoy themselves. (laughs) That's just what happens when you have this much volume, and each specialist is focused on raising the quality of their section—it translates into higher quality in the overall finished product, I think.

To be honest, I myself did not imagine it would all come together as well as it has. More and more things kept getting added as the development went on. Normally when making games, you have to scale things down from your initial vision, but with Sonic Adventure we achieved all we set out to do AND more. Plus there's the internet features, which I personally spent a long time working on… I was working on it so much that people started to wonder what I was doing. (laughs)

—What kind of players are you hoping to attract with Sonic Adventure?

Naka: First would be people who don't know Sonic. And of course people who already love Sonic, we're trying to satisfy them too. I even think this game would be enjoyable to anti-Sonic people. I hope it sells as well as the Dreamcast console itself, that would be great. But you know, I don't think there's ever been a launch title for a new console like Sonic Adventure, with so much effort put into it. It caused a lot of anguish, but thanks to everyone's hard work we've made a very good game. The mood on the floor at Sega's offices reminds me of how it felt when the first Sonic came out and received such high praise in America. That spirit is lifting everyone up, from the sales staff to the whole company. I haven't seen such high spirits at Sega in awhile.

—This must be a first for you, too, to work on so many titles at the same time as the Dreamcast release.

Naka: To tell you the truth, when we set out to make Sonic Adventure, we had to decide whether to make it for the Sega Saturn or the Dreamcast. Before that decision was made, I actually felt the Saturn might be the better choice. No doubt making it for the Dreamcast was the right call, and is the reason we've produced something of such quality. But in turn, I wanted to do something for Saturn users too, and that was how the Sonic Jam and Sonic R projects came about, developed concurrently. Then, when the Burning Rangers development concluded, that whole staff went straight over to Sonic Adventure. These all became huge projects, and honestly, Sega CS gave everything they had to complete them. Panzer Dragoon director Manabu Kusunoki helped out too, as did several other members of the CS team. Sonic Adventure really owes its existence to Sega CS' full mobilization.

—The maps and terrain in Sonic Adventure are surely huge, but this being Sonic, there's got to be a lot of sections where he zooms through everything at light speed, right?

Hoshino: Yeah, you could say that's part of the dynamism of Sonic. (laughs) That exhiliration of blazing through this huge area in one instant, that's what Sonic is all about! (laughs)

Naka: Yes, exactly. (laughs) No matter how much blood, sweat, and tears the designers put into the details of the maps, there's no knowing whether it will even register as anything more than a blur as the player zooms through the levels. (laughs) We had to remake a lot of them this time. As our first Dreamcast title, at first there was a lot of crazy talk about making truly humongous levels (laughs), but the development was more tentative than that, with a lot of groping in the dark as we learned what the actual capabilities of the hardware were. Along the way it turned out that many of the stages we'd made wouldn't work, and they had to be tossed.

It wasn't until we were making the Lost World stage that we finally started to get a handle on everything and see, OK, this is the standard. That meant we had to go back and remake all the stages we had done up to then though, to be in line with this new understanding. And we re-worked quite a few of them.

—How did the staff feel about that? About having to abandon a lot of what they'd done, I mean.

Katano: Not all of the programming had to be tossed, I think it was worse for the designers…?

Hoshino: Yeah, for the designers, we had to throw away everything we'd done up before that. (laughs) I think it's for the best though, since we ended up lighting the way for the Dreamcast titles to come.

—Given the volume of Sonic Adventure, adjusting the difficulty must have been a challenge too.

Naka: Yeah. For that, we solicited feedback from a number of different departments at Sega, and we also sent Iizuka to America to do direct consumer research. Taking all that into account, for the final weeks, we closely followed the testplayers and made a lot of adjustments. Your average person, for example, doesn't know anything about the basic Sonic game conventions, like how you won't take damage if you have rings, or how you can attack while jumping. It's all completely natural to us developers, but we learned from the consumer research that a lot of people don't know that stuff. So we inserted messages and explanations in various places. For this development we went beyond just satisfying our own desires as the developers, and made sure inexperienced players would be able to have a good time, too.

—The players have a lot of choices in Sonic Adventure, like how you advance through the stages, or whether to listen to the conversations in town.

Naka: The biggest thing in our developments is making sure we don't lock the player into one playstyle. Every player is different. Some people like to play as speedy as possible, and others enjoy taking time with the A-LIFE system and the Chao. Others like the minigames. Our feeling is go ahead! Play however you want. So the conversations with the people in town, this being an action game, those are optional. You can choose to talk to them only when you're lost and don't know what to do, that's perfectly fine.

—You can play with the Chao from the very start in the prologue. They're so cute. (laughs) Many mysteries remain about them though...

Naka: There are some people on our team whose entire job was working on the Chao. We tried to include a lot of in-game instruction and explanations… was that helpful?

—Well, it was very frustrating how I'd keep trying to grab a Chao and instead do a spin attack. (laughs)

Naka: Yeah, the difference between those inputs is razor-thin. (laughs) Opinions were divided on that up to the very end of the development, actually, so we added a hidden command where you can press Y to grab the Chao as well. With X or B it's much more risky. (laughs)

—I wasn't sure how to hatch the Chao either. It was like, am I supposed to Spin Attack this...? (laughs) I tried throwing it around too. (laughs)

Naka: Oh no! (laughs) If you do that, the Chao will dislike you. You have to shake it to hatch it. While holding it, you move the stick around to shake it up. That's the basic way to hatch it.

—Oh? Really? One of our editors figured out how to hatch it by doing a dash throw, and that became the standard way around our office. (laughs)

Iizuka: It will definitely hate you in the beginning then. (laughs)

—I wanted to ask, what is the meaning of the emblems?

Iizuka: As you know, Sonic Adventure has branching stage paths. The emblems are therefore a way for you to visibly track your overall achievements. They don't have any particular effect on their own though. They make it easier to compete and show who's best among your friends.

—Of the six playable characters, people seem to be having some trouble with Amy. Can you give any advice there?

Iizuka: In every stage, there are spots where if you hide with Amy, the enemies will forget about you. If you find those spots it should open up a new way to progress through the stages for you. Think of her stages as mental puzzles, if you will.

—In our first interview, Iizuka said that when he was developing the NiGHTS games, that after spending all this time making games where the characters fly around, it made him really want to make a Sonic game where the character runs along the ground. Now that you've finished Sonic, has the opposite feeling taken hold? Do you want to make a game like NiGHTS again where you soar through the sky?

Naka: No, I mean, you get to fly a lot in this game! With Knuckles and Tails. There's lots of ways, including flying, to enjoy the stages we've made this time.

Iizuka: Yeah, it feels like for all six characters, we've maximized the gameplay possibilities in the stages for each of them.

—We're about to head into winter vacation, so for players who are going to spend their vacation trying to conquer Sonic Adventure, please give a final word.

Naka: It's a very well-made action game, but there's lots of other ways to play too. Please look forward to our upcoming internet events. We're teaming up with a magazine company and should have a lot of fun stuff to offer you soon.

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Sonic Adventure - 1999 Composer Interview

originally featured in Dreamcast Magazine

Jun Senoue - Composer/Sound Director
Fumie Kumatani - Composer (Amy)
Kenichi Tokoi - Composer (Knuckles)

—The melody for Sonic's theme really gets stuck in my head!

Senoue: I wanted the lyrics to be unabashedly heroic, that was the big sticking point for me. At first it was a lighter, brighter song, but people said it shouldn't be too poppy, so I reworked it into the current version. The intro and the chorus retain the feeling from that poppier version, but once the singing starts the whole mood changes.

—Can you tell us a little about each theme?

Senoue: There have never been any lyrics for any Sonic game yet, so for Sonic's theme "It Doesn't Matter", I tried to portray something like his way of life. (laughs) Positive and energetic, those were my keywords. Miles' song, "Believe in Myself", is all about being positive and doing your best. He has such a clear personality that I didn't really struggle writing it. One interesting point, Miles is a boy but his theme is sung by a female vocalist. As for Big, he's a carefree character (a rarity for Sonic Team), so for his theme "Lazy Days ~Livin' in Paradise~", I knew it shouldn't be anything downtempo, and I tried to give it a light vibe. The lyrics were too difficult for me, so I just did the music and handed the lyrics off to Kumatani. (laughs)

Kumatani: Amy has a cheerful, powerful, somewhat cheeky kogyaru personality, and I tried to portray that in her song. Recently people have been telling me, "Kumatani, you and Amy are really in sync, aren't you?" (laughs)

Tokoi: Knuckles is stubborn and serious. I wanted to convey the nuances of those emotions with the music, and I decided to have rap to show off a little of his "bad boy" attitude. I think the contrast feels really nice.

—Of the six theme songs, what were some of the most difficult parts you struggled with writing?

Senoue: The main theme "Open Your Heart" was a struggle for me. I re-wrote it nine times! If you look at the game when I first started composing it, the visuals changed a lot between now and then, and those continual improvements to the visuals spurred me on to keep improving the music too. As the new visuals came into to focus, and I started to grasp what the mood should be for Chaos, the atmosphere of the composition, as well as my own personal aims for it changed along the way. Despite starting early, after all those revisions it ended up being the 9th song I wrote for the soundtrack. This finalized version, once I figured out what I wanted to do, it came together quickly. Well, the accompaniment at least. (laughs)

When it came time to write the main melody I again got stuck, and after several consultations with Kenichi Tokoi at the Sega studio, I tried out a bunch of melodies until we found something good. I had really wanted to show some portion of it at the announcement on 8/22, but unfortunately we hadn't been able to record the vocals yet. I had the lyrics and vocal part written though, so I contacted my friend Sakamoto from Animetal and created a special "announcement version" which we shared on the homepage.

—Did you face any challenges during the recording sessions?

Senoue: For the three songs I wrote, I was able to participate in the recording myself in LA and Tokyo, but Kumatani and Tokoi's songs for Amy and Knuckles, as well as Big's song which I collaborated on with Kumatani—for those three, we used the BEAT ON BEAT production studio in New York, who I'd worked with before on the music production of NiGHTS and Burning Rangers. We did the pre-production in Japan, but then had the musicians in New York finish the pieces. Naturally, because of that, those songs have a markedly different feel from something made in Japan, and our team loved them too. I think it put a lot of wind in Kumatani and Tokoi's sails, as well.

—The lyrics for the these songs are all in English. How did you go about writing them?

Senoue: I normally listen to a lot of English lyrics, so I wrote them out myself in English (from the start, not translated).

Kumatani: I wrote mine in Japanese first and translated them. I worked together with the translator to make sure that the feeling I wanted to convey actually had that meaning in English!

Tokoi: My problem with translating from Japanese to English is that the expressions are often wrong, and if you try to translate based on the meaning it can come out sounding really lame. There were parts of the lyrics I didn't want to change or compromise, though, so it was a real struggle for me.

Kumatani: It was my first time writing lyrics, and I have to say, it was more fun than writing the music!

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