Check for the kickass concept stuff at the bottom, I stupidly put the questions in quotes.



P: Sonic 2 (Bonus Stage design assistance), Sonic Spinball (Lead Design), Comix Zone (Lead Design), Sonic Saturn & Sonic Pool (Saturn concepts/prototypes)




P: Spinball was my first full project, so it was super exciting, but it was also a title we had to get out in something like 9 months, so it showed.  ComixZone was a game I was extremely passionate about -- definitely my favorite project while at STI.


P:  Long.  I was single and had no kids back then, so I was in no hurry to get home.  I loved the job and would stick around doing and learning stuff.  The Sonic Team guys were notorious for working ridiculously long hours (some of them slept on the floor in their cubes) and I enjoyed venturing over to their area to see what they had going on – some of those guys were just amazing artists, just drawing these great designs non-stop.  As for diversions, a few times a week I’d go play b’ball with Chris Senn and every Friday night a number of us would carpool to North Beach in San Francisco (Little Italy) for food, beers and to hang out; it became part of our routine for solid 2-3 years.



P:  I joined in early 1992, when Mark Cerny was in charge.  I was very green but I was thrilled to be a part of the industry and working with some of Sega guys from Japan.  STI was very experimental back then with many cool and wacky game concepts in the works.  This was a time when the Genesis was starting to seriously take off and SEGA was beginning to grow, so there was a lot of excitement around the company – I would always look forward to the SoA employee meetings to see what cool new titles or hardware were in the works.  Initially, there was a lot of camaraderie and co-mingling with the Japanese team, but it didn’t last and soon they were moved off to a separate room.  By 1995 most of the Sonic Team were back in Japan (working on Nights) and STI became pretty corporate and political.  But it was definitely good times!



P:  Sonic X-treme was Chris Senn’s and Ofer Alon’s baby, started while Adrian and I were still working on Comix Zone.  After that, we struck a deal with Sega to let us set up a satellite office in LA (STI Burbank) to work on next-gen Saturn tech/concepts, but those were unrelated to X-treme.



P:  Gee, I don’t really recognize these screenshots.  Chris Senn is your best bet here.  I do remember a very cool level editor Ofer was developing for the game on a Mac, but that’s about it.  I do know that there was some serious anxiety about X-treme toward the end and some other programmer within STI hacked together some quick demos to appease the execs; perhaps this is one of those builds?    


P:  I dug up some concept artwork from the Sonic Saturn projects Adrian and I worked on at STI Burbank (see attached).

 

Questions for you

 

A beta ROM image of Comix Zone was leaked to the internet at some point, a member of our community got their hands on it and has a few questions.

 




P:  The original concept had the main hero as a scrawny artist dude by the name of Joe Pencil, but we ultimately changed him to be a tough Gen-Xer; the marketing people came up with the name Sketch Turner much later in development.  So, the first header must be some legacy text.  The second string, I think it was Adrian’s own localization, you know, placeholder text.  Obviously, he replaced them for the final release.




P:  It must’ve been Howard Drossin (our in-house sound/music composer) swapping in the final theme at the last minute.  I recall that we were going for a really grungy sound for the game and it took a good effort on Howard’s part to achieve it on the Genesis sound chip.




P:  Don’t remember.  We probably needed to get some memory back for stability reasons.




P:  I bet these were Howard’s placeholder sounds.  Adrian and Dean Lester (our producer) are both Brits, and Howard loved poking fun at them, really at everybody.  These sounds definitely had nothing to do with the Mortus character.




P:  I think she was speaking on behalf of the ‘empire’ or something like that.  She was the only (human) sidekick planned, but of course, Sketch also had his interactive pet rat.




P:  There were no concrete plans at that time, but we left it open for that possibility.  I even made some quick prelim storyboards for how the Comix Zone concept could work in 3D on the Saturn (see attached), but ultimately Sega wanted us to work on a Sonic property next.




Comix Zone 3D: http://xtreme.projectsonic.com/PeterStuff/..._PanelEntry.jpg
SonicSaturn BackGround: http://xtreme.projectsonic.com/PeterStuff/..._Background.JPG