Sonic Boom was a spin-off Sonic franchise that came in in 2014 to pretty mixed – and
mostly harsh – reviews.
Featuring the likes of a television show, three video games, a new comic series from
Archie comics and brand new toys by Tomy, Sega had banked quite a bit on this new take
of the blue blur and his pals.
But with really poor designs and very ambitious ideas, the franchise ultimately floundered,
despite the television series being a bit of a saving grace.
So today, we’re diving deeper into Sonic Boom with our top 10 Sonic Boom Surprising
Facts.
10 Not a Reboot One of the biggest mistakes made by a lot
of Sonic fans upon seeing the new character designs was to assume that Sonic Boom was
a reboot of the whole series.
In fact, it’s a ‘different branch’ of the Sonic universe, an interpretation by developer
Big Red Button of Sonic and his pals.
The television series, which took its cues from the game, was produced by Sega of America
and Technicolor Animation Productions, and was the 5th animated series starting the blue
blur as its title character.
9 Fan Feedback A lot of long time Sonic fans – and even
casual players – weren’t overly keen on the changes.
This led to a lot of fan art online mocking the inclusion of ‘bandages’ and the other
cringe worthy accessories that Sonic and pals were wearing.
This included taking these new aesthetics and putting them on Nintendo characters as
a joke.
The strongest negative reception was for Knuckles the Echinda, though.
The character looked as if he was pumped up with steroids, now significantly taller than
his usual self, boasting large muscles and a lot of bandages.
The character would prove to be even crappier when the game came out, being a dumbed down
version that was loaded with slow and stupid dialogue.
8 Rise of Lyric The first Sonic Boom game to be released was
Rise of Lyric.
Initially, when pre-release demos of the game were featured at the 2014 E3, there were some
mixed reviews, yet a few publications, like Destructoid, still nominated it for best platformer
and Best of E3 awards on their individual sites.
Others, like GameCental, panned it, calling it “the worst game in the line-up was Sega’s
Sonic Boom, which was so unspeakably awful we couldn’t even force ourselves to play
through the whole demo.”
The latter review was the most telling for what the kind of reception the final release
of the game would receive, with critics ripping on it for its horrible level design, dull
combat, “terrible camera”, broken graphics and serious bugs, with some even calling it
the worst game of 2014.
7 The Lowest Selling Games With reviews like that, it should be no surprise
that Sonic Boom, at the time of its release, was the lowest selling Sonic game of all time.
Released in the depths of SEGA’s financial report that year, it was noted that Sonic
Boom: Rise of Lyric had sold only 490,000 copies worldwide of the game on both the WiiU
and 3DS.
Compared to the 15 million copies that the original Sonic the Hedgehog game has acquired
over the years, that’s a little depressing.
To make matters worse, combined with Sonic Boom shattered Crystal, the franchise had
only sold around 620,000 by May 2015.
6 Uncharted Inspired Despite hard core failing, the team behind
Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric was pretty solid.
It included the likes of Uncharted and Jak and Daxter veteran Bob Rafei.
For those of you who are Uncharted fans, you might be putting two and two together concerning
Nathan Drake’s threads and Sonic’s Sonic Boom aesthetic.
Rafei stated in an interview that, “We were exploring different outfits and we went through
a lot of iterations, and the scarf was something I’ve used in the past and it works for me
and it works for the character.”
Oh and it gets better, too.
He went on to say, “Really, the history of that comes from the old western days, with
John Wayne, and as a kid watching a lot of those westerns, that really stuck with me.
And you see the use of the afghan in a lot of action movies because of the soldiers…
so that SNA made its way into what makes a character action hero nowadays.”
Cringe.
5 Sticks the Badger Let’s talk a little about the one positive
aspect of Sonic Boom, the animated series.
The main cast of characters were Sonic, Tails, Amy, Knuckles and Sticks the Badger, a brand
new character who made her debut in the Archie comics in Sonic Boom issue 1.
Bill Freiberger, who was the show’s executive producer, head writer and co-showrunner, has
said that Sticks represents his own belief system, in the sense that the character will
say something absurd, only for that absurd thing to be proven correct by the end of an
episode.
He has also stated that the character brings a healthy dose of cynicism to the series to
counter the heroism of the other characters, making her more of an anti-hero.
4 Voice Actors The cast behind the voices of the Sonic Boom
animated show are pretty stellar.
Roger Craig Smith plays Sonic – he’s played Ezio in Assassin’s Creed, Captain America
in Avengers Assemble, Chris Redfield in Resident Evil, Batman in Arkham Origins and Kyle Crane
in Dying Light, just to name a few.
Mike Pollock plays Robotnik, who has played the mad scientist character in over 18 games,
beginning with 2005’s Shadow the Hedgehog.
Travis Willingham is the voice of Knuckles, along with 7 other characters in the show
and miscellaneous voices, and Cindy Robinson plays Amy Rose, who also plays the voice of
Betty Boop in various commercials.
3 Extreme Concepts If you thought the final concepts for the
Sonic Boom characters were ridiculous, turns out they could have been A LOT worse.
While it’s uncertain how many version of previous concept art for the series exists,
Sega did release some of Big Red Button’s musing for the new design for the character
back in November of 2014.
Bob Rafei has stated that “there were some more extreme concepts, seeing how far we wanted
to go with some variations.
And Sonic team reined us in, and ultimately, the designs that you see today are part of
that collaborative process of going back and forth.”
While these designs definitely don’t fit into the original Sonic DNA that Rafei and
his team aimed to align with, they would have provided a much more interesting take to many
fans than the designs we ended up with.
2 Westernized We mentioned earlier that developers Big Red
Button were spearheading Sonic Boom.
So why did Sega choose to give Sonic over to a Western company rather than create the
new branch with Sonic Team?
The reasoning behind the switch up was because Sega wanted Sonic to be more appealing to
Western audiences.
Takashi Iizuka, who was overseeing everything at Big Red Button, said in an interview that,
I quote, “As part of completely thinking about the West, we wanted to make sure we
had Western game developers and make it a part of Western television.
We wanted to make sure it was developed best for Western audiences primarily; this was
very important.”
1 What Went Wrong Former Sega of America producer Stephen Frost
gave an interview back in 2015 about why he believes the Sonic Boom games were a bomb,
speaking about it a month after he had left the company.
Frost stated that the franchise’s goal was to reinvent itself since the core Sonic fan
base was shrinking.
Frost has stated that, I quote, “The biggest mistake in Boom was adding too many features
to it.
It was too much to ask of any development team.
I was tasked with creating an experience that appeals to an audience which doesn’t play
Sonic.
If I could do it again, I would remove features and speed would be the main focus from the
start.”
There we have it friends!
Are you fans of the Sonic Boom franchise?
Did you love the show but hate the games?
Let us know your thoughts in those comments below!
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