How Sonic went from "fighting to survive" to being a global megastar in 10 years: Sega's Sonic series producer tells all

Sonic the Hedgehog has been on a redemption arc.

It might not feel like the blue blur has ever really left us – and that’s because he hasn’t – but sometimes you need to reach the summit to survey that which has come before. It’s only when we consider Sonic’s current position when directly compared to years prior that the disastrous depths the world’s favorite hedgehog plunged becomes truly clear.

Sega knows it, too. For Takashi Iizuka, the Sonic series producer who first worked on the franchise just two years into his career, fresh out of university, he naturally ties the memories – and comparisons – to different periods of his life.

“Ten years ago, I moved from Tokyo to Burbank. At that time, the Sonic brand was not in a very positive space. A lot of people were bashing on the brand. They really weren’t happy with the things coming out,” Iizuka recalls.

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He’s right, of course. On the timeline he presents, he moved to the states after a bumpy time for Sonic. There was the decent Colors and Generations, yes. But then there was also the diabolical Sonic 4, the middling Lost World, and the infamously broken and unfinished Sonic Boom (which did at least produce a genuinely highly underrated cartoon, but even that struggled to find an audience). Times were rough.

It was in the wake of projects like this that Iizuka made his move. He ended up splitting his time between managing Sonic Team back in Japan and taking care of product development at Sega of America.

“When I moved over from Tokyo to Los Angeles, it was like an ‘oh my god’ moment,” Iizuka admits. “Like, we need to save the brand, or this brand isn’t going to be around for much longer.”

What began was a herculean fight back. The charge was led by a smart decision to pivot to the fans. That gave us Sonic Mania, where Iizuka supervised a team of folk who’d spent decades ripping apart the best Sonic games to reverse engineer them. Mania ended up the highest-scoring non-racing Sonic game in fifteen years.

Then the train kept rolling. Sonic Forces was a little shaky, but it laid groundwork for Sonic Frontiers, a bizarre but nevertheless compelling vision of video game open worlds interpolated through the traditions and tropes of Sonic.

Perhaps the confidence in the franchise is best represented, though, in the release of The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, a free visual novel released on April Fools Day 2023 that is actually, er, This is the sort of thing a Japanese publisher would usually greenlight for a beloved cash cow mascot. But Sega is now thinking differently.

Then come movies, and Netflix, and even something of a creative renaissance for the long-running Sonic comics with a shift in publisher. In fact, as a British-based website we are contractually bound to note that the only true tragedy remains the continued dormancy of the comic’s excellent UK iteration, which died alongside Sega’s hardware-publishing aspirations.