Sonic voice actor wasn’t sure about his Sonic Frontiers voice either

“If I had a nickel for every time, yeah, it would be a very different existence, I would imagine,” Roger Craig Smith tells Polygon over a video call. He’s been the voice of Sonic since 2010, debuting in the Xbox 360 Kinetic game Sonic Free Riders two weeks before Sonic Colors was released.

“It’s literally what I think of [when] trying to do the voice. It’s like, ‘You gotta go fast,’” Smith says. “There it is. That’s the character.”

Sonic has been rolling around at the speed of sound for quite a while. The Blue Blur turns 35 years old in 2026 as the original Sonic the Hedgehog was released in June 1991. But his first appearance was actually in the arcade game Rad Mobile, which was launched worldwide in February 1991. Smith came to Sonic long after the hedgehog had already established himself as a bona fide mascot for Sega, yet he’s the longest-tenured Sonic English voice actor. Though Sonic has such a long legacy behind him, Smith knows firsthand how much room there still is to get creative with the legendary hero.

The Sonic franchise is one defined by experimentation. From the character to the games themselves, Sega always seems to be zigging where fans expect it to zag. That’s a philosophy shared by Smith, a voice actor who is no stranger to personal reinvention.

Before he pivoted to voice-acting full time, Smith tried his hand at being a stand-up comedian. Instead of infusing his sets with social commentary or stories pulled from his life experiences, Smith would do bits as characters with funny voices. When enough people started asking him if he did voice work for cartoons, he finally took the hint and set down his path toward voice acting.

“It really combined everything that I loved, the improv of comedy, the character arc and understanding of story arc,” Smith says. “I haven’t looked back after that.”

Image: Sega

Smith has taken on several big-time video game roles since, like Chris Redfield in Resident Evil and Assassin’s Creed’s Ezio Auditore da Firenze, but few have the legacy and longevity that Sonic does. Working with a character like that can be daunting for a voice actor. With something like a long-running superhero, there are usually only so many liberties you can take.

“They all live in a box that we feel like, ‘Okay, we can play around within that box, but if you start stepping too far outside of it […] it’s a violation of the character,’” Smith says. “It’s a delicate dance.”

With Sonic, however, there’s more room to color outside the lines. He’s typically a jokester, but something like Sonic Frontiers found him being played more seriously than past iterations. Smith has fun with that flexibility every time he tackles the role, including when he got to break the fourth wall by joking about his name in Sonic Boom.

“Sonic’s maybe a little bit more playful in that regard because he’s just such a snarky, playful character,” Smith says. “You’re not going to hear Batman saying ‘Baldy McNosehair’ anytime soon.”

That snarkiness allows Smith to tap into his improv comedy background, something that’s benefitted him across roles. He notes how so much of a voice actor’s work can be throwing different ideas at the wall to see what lands, resulting in a collaborative process between him, the director, and the writers.

“Our job is to take the work and bring it to life vocally, bring it to inhabit the character, give it character through the vocal process. And that usually requires a little bit of a loosey-goosey approach,” Smith says. “Otherwise, every single character would sound exactly the way if it’s not being written too thoroughly, it would have the sort of cadence and tone of a writer and sometimes that doesn’t work for each individual character.”

Image: Technicolor Animation Productions/Sega

Not every change or experiment with a character goes over well, however. Case in point: Sonic Frontiers. “I found myself going, ‘Oh, OK, this’ll be interesting to see how this lands,’” Smith says.

For 2022’s Sonic Frontiers, the hedgehog has a noticeably deeper voice than his usual high-pitch, sarcastic tone in a bid to fit the game’s more serious story and atmosphere than past Sonic adventures, a choice that Smith had previously called “bizarre” at a GalaxyCon panel. The direction of Sonic’s voice in Frontiers took some players by surprise and didn’t land with everyone.

“That was such a vocal departure from everything we had been doing, but it was so important for that particular project, and yet it didn’t go so far,” Smith says.

He still hasn’t played Frontiers yet, but that’s par for the recent course for Smith. (“I’ve been woefully behind on just about every single game that I’ve been a part of as of late,” he says.) Still, though, he tries to play games that he’s voiced in to discover just how his performance was used, and how that can inform him for the next gig.

“I always talk about it like, ‘You birth this vocal baby.’ And then I hand that vocal baby to people who can be in charge of sometimes making that vocal baby look real pretty or look really ugly,” he says. “I like to see how my vocal baby grew up once the game is released. It’s like you get the school pictures in the mail of your vocal baby and you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah. I don’t know about that outfit.’”

Image: Sonic Team/Sega

Though 2026 is a big year for Sonic, publisher Sega hasn’t detailed how, exactly, it’ll celebrate the hedgehog yet. It has teased anniversary-related “content, partnerships, collectibles, and fan experiences,” and we know Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds will receive more crossover racers as DLC. Aside from that, we’ll have to wait and see what Sonic, Sega, and Smith have in store for the Blue Blur.

Smith sure sounds excited about it, though — even if he still hasn’t played Sonic Frontiers. Whether or not we’ll hear his deep-voiced Sonic again this year is a mystery, but his message to longtime players is clear: “There’s never been a better time to be a Sonic fan.”