The original Sonic the Hedgehog game was “terribly controversial” at Sega, according to PlayStation’s Mark Cerny, who’s detailed more on its development in a new interview.
Cerny was lead system architect for Sony’s PS4 and PS5 consoles, but began his career at Atari before moving to Sega and founding its Sega Technical Institute in America. It’s this team that developed the sequel Sonic the Hedgehog 2, after the original game was made in Japan.
The first time he saw Sonic the Hedgehog, it was “obvious that game was going to do great,” Cerny told journalist Simon Parkin on the My Perfect Console podcast.
Was there pressure to find a mascot to rival Nintendo’s Mario? “The pressure was to make a game that could sell a million copies,” Cerny replied, before describing the game as “terribly controversial” due to the increase in resources focused on the game, which ultimately led to Sonic co-creator Yuji Naka’s departure from Sega.
“Part of the idea there was…Let’s put much more resource on this project than we usually do,” said Cerny. “As I said, what’s usual? Three people, three months. So they were going to do, if I remember properly, three people, ten months. But they ended up needing four and a half people for 14 months. I’m a little hazy on the numbers these days. And though it was a success, they blew their budget so badly by putting in a couple of engineers on this that Yuji Naka was just getting yelled at and quit the company.”
Cerny admitted “it pays off fantastically well for Sega” due to the success of the game. “But Yuji Naka was pretty tired of the situation by that point.” Cerny described Naka as a “top level creator making $60,000 [after a bonus] in their best year and getting yelled at a lot. And he’d had it.”
Famously, development on the Sonic series after the success of the first game was split. Development of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 moved to the Sega Technical Institute in America founded by Cerny and included original developers Naka and designer Hirokazu Yasuhara. Meanwhile in Japan, another Sonic game was developed by original co-creator Naoto Ohshima intended to be a sequel, but ultimately became Sonic CD.
Cerny noted “nobody realised how big Sonic was going to be” in either Sega Japan or America. “Sonic ships and almost immediately I’ve got the team ready to work on a sequel and do you want a sequel? And I’ve got Sega of America saying no, it’s much too soon. Do a different game first,” he said.
That soon changed following sales of Sonic the Hedgehog over its first Christmas period, quickly leading to the sequel’s development by STI.
Cerny described his time at Sega overall as “brutal”. “Atari was great, Sega was difficult,” he said. “It was a difficult environment with a hard-driving president who was going to force us to success. That isn’t to say that there wasn’t an incredible amount of cameraderie with the people that I worked with but it was just brutal. Nakayama [president of Sega Japan] would come in and he would just give it to us if he didn’t see happening what he wanted to see.”
“Getting out of Sega was a very healthy thing,” he said, before adding “Nakayama is amazing. He understood games like nobody’s business…It’s just that working for Nakayama – that was difficult and seven years of that was enough.”
Sonic co-creator Yuji Naka has since had something of a fall from grace. After eventually leaving Sega in 2006, he later developed Balan Wonderworld with Square Enix which was considered a critical and commercial flop on its release in 2021. He soon left the company and accused Square Enix of removing him as director six months before its launch.
Then, in 2022, he was arrested for insider trading at Square Enix, which led to a suspended prison sentence.
