Takashi Iizuka, the head of Sega’s Sonic Team, knows speed. So when it came to developing a new Sonic Racing game, Crossworlds, there was an obvious question: Just how fast could Sonic and his squad go in the current-gen era? Because, you know, they gotta go fast.
“Sonic is known for speed and we like putting that into our racing games, but it was one of the challenges the team had when they went to develop the game,” Iizuka told Polygon via an interpreter during a play session at Summer Game Fest. The Sonic Racing development team started “building the game out at a speed that they felt was appropriate” based on course design, but early playtests motivated them to recalibrate.
“One of the things that we found out is that our Sonic fans want to go even faster,” he said. “What regular people felt was a great speed, our Sonic fans wanted to go faster. So the development team put in a Super Sonic speed into the game to really deliver what those hardcore Sonic fans want out of a fast racing experience.”
GIF: Sega via Polygon
The effort is felt. After 30 minutes of hands-on time with Sonic Racing Crossworlds, during which I raced as Sonic, Shadow, and Knuckles in various car mashups across three different cups, I was genuinely surprised at the speed of the play. Maybe years of Mario Kart has dulled my senses — the Nintendo franchise is not exactly known for the type of physics that would impress racing-game fiends — but Sonic Racing Crossworlds felt like a racing game first and a tour through Sonic history second. While I was tickled by the team’s decision to build an entire course out of the aircraft carrier from Sonic Adventure 2, I was more impressed by how challenging I found the early rounds, where hitting every turn and nailing every drift is required to beat the top AI challengers.
Iizuka thinks that’s the differentiator between his Sonic racing games and the obvious competition: The mechanics, the customization, and the chaos are all rooted in the tradition of racing games, not franchise extensions. There are slower modes that will cater to the more casual players, but there are also tons of options for competitors who really want to dig in and… well, compete. The big addition to Crossworlds is a gadget system that functions a bit like a skill tree, unlocking various improvements that can be slotted into car builds. One enhancement might allow you to steal speed-improving rings from players by bumping into them; another might weaponize your drift or amplify its boost. Those little choices, and how you implement them mid-lap, can make or break a race.
Image: Sega
The team strived to “make sure we’re allowing people to have a fun and fair racing experience,” Iizuka said, but a Sonic racing game also needed to throw a curveball (spinball?). And in Crossworlds, it’s the travel ring, a mid-race portal that sends all the drivers to a different map for one lap.
“We don’t think any other game has had it now, and we don’t think any other game is going to have it in the future,” Iizuka said. “But it’s coming out of an idea of how we could change the race dynamic. By having the travel ring be that second course, you’re going to a brand-new location, you’re no longer doing three laps on the same track. We’ve flipped the tables.”
Crossworlds has all the prerequisites of a cartoony racing game: high-impact weapons, vivid courses, loads of voice-acted taunting, and console cross-play (a technical achievement for the team that Iizuka calls “a high hurdle that we put up there and wanted to clear it”). But as Sonic’s greatest champion, I asked Iizuka if he was worried that it would make his guy look bad if he lost a race.
“Sonic wants to have a fair competition,” the game designer said. “So he’s getting in a car as well. It’s fair because everyone’s got to be in a vehicle.”
But could Sonic outrun one of the cars? Iizuka doesn’t require an interpreter to respond: “Oh yeah.”
Sonic World Crossworlds will be released on Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S on Sept. 25.