CREATING SONIC 3 & KNUCKLES

Roger Hector on working on the acclaimed game

Roger’s role

My job was to interface between the Sonic team and the rest of the company. I had to keep the rest of the company from interfering with or bothering the team, and keep the team on track. I had to make sure they had what they needed, and if they had problems, I had to solve them. This included everything from scheduling and resources to giving creative input and resolving personal disputes.

The language barrier

Most of the Japanese team spoke some English. Those that were more fluent did translation for the others. There were some additional Sega Of Japan management staff that came in and helped with communications at big meetings. We also brought in an outside language teacher and conducted a regular Berlitz class in Japanese.

Splitting the game and lock-on technology There were so many creative ideas that it would take too much time to develop such a massive project. The team brainstormed up two games’ worth of material initially and it was decided, before the Alpha stage I think, that it would make more sense to split it into two games. It was a tricky technical piece of work, but these guys were some of the best in the industry and it came off pretty smoothly.

Discussing the soundtrack

Michael Jackson was a very big fan of Sonic and he wanted to record a soundtrack for the game. He came to STI and met with the team to discuss the design theme, story, and feel of the game. He then went away and recorded an entire soundtrack that covered all of the worlds. It was fantastic […] We had it all ready and integrated into the game when the first news stories came out accusing him of child molestation, and Sega had to back away from this collaboration. It was very late in the development process, and we had to quickly put together a complete replacement music track.