Sonic Boom: "We're not taking over canon"

Big Red Button's Bob Rafei discusses working with Sonic Team and reinventing a hedgehog and his friends.

Bob Rafei worked on both Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter while at Naughty Dog, now he's tackling Sonic the Hedgehog with Big Red Button.

"The goal was to make sure that the other three characters [apart from Sonic] were just as compelling," says Rafei. "So all the changes that we've done to the characters and all the modifications to support our character adventure story so that way when you run to the controller and the first kid is picking up Sonic the other kids are not disappointed cause they have to pick Amy or Knuckles or Tails."

Obviously reshaping an icon can create turmoil, but Refai explains that Sonic Team were very supportive.

"The advantage of working with Sega and Sonic Team is that they have been living with this franchise for 20 years," says Refai. "They really understand it. Sonic Team in particular. So when we were looking at where's our boundaries of how far do we go to make modifications, Sonic Team were very instrumental to... First of all, they were very open minded in all the changes that we were looking to do, the modifications. And eventually we found the guardrails that would be part of our exploration of what makes Sonic no longer a Sonic experience. And we found that out by the wacky ideas that we put on the table and ultimately what you see today was a combination of all the things that we felt were within the Sonic DNA, but tweaked in a slightly different way to give you a different kind of experience."

Refai then compares video games to another branch of popular culture, comics, where reinventing and creating separate universes/versions of characters is more commonplace.

"I think you'll start to see more of that in our industry, in the games industry," says Rafei. "You'll see Sega being forward thinking and taking a different branch. We're not taking over canon. Canon is going to continue. This is just a different branch that in encompasses the toy line, the 3DS and the Wii U games, and the TV show. All those things under the Sonic Boom branch are very consistent in their approach to the universe."