SEGA on the reaction to Sonic Mania and its influence on the franchise's future, bringing Forces to Switch

Coming from a Eurogamer interview with Shun Nakamura, game designer and producer at Sonic Team...

EU: It's one of the best received Sonic games, critically, for quite some time. Seeing that kind of reaction, has that made you take stock and rethink your approach with your own games?

Shun Nakamura: It was very interesting for me to see Sonic Mania come out, get very high scores and have people praise the game. From the team's perspective, we're still going to be making 3D games for the audience that likes that style of Sonic - when we see the reactions that Mania got, the entire team sat down and thought it was really interesting, and we should break down what people liked about Mania, and in the future - when we build our 3D games - see what essence we can take from Sonic Mania and put into a 3D world, to give people what they're looking for and that they've found in Sonic Mania.

EU: You've got a Switch version - what have you had to do to get it running on that hardware?

Shun Nakamura: When we were doing concepts for the game, we really wanted to make it multiplatform. Regardless of what hardware you have, how you're playing the game - the base idea is for that experience to be the same on the machine. And this was back before anyone knew what the Nintendo Switch would be. Even when we were drawing the lines of having Xbox One, PS4, we were going to have Nintendo's new hardware - even though we didn't know anything about it, we got the budget and schedule sorted before we even knew what existed. It was a bit of a panic when we first got the Switch - it was a little bit different to what we were expecting, so it was a case of seeing how we could make that work. There were some challenges - but because we have our own engine, we were able to customise it very quickly in a way that could work for the Switch, and in a way that it could really be the same experience on the Switch without it having to feel or look different.