Is it for a new game, or a social media activity? Nobody seems to know!
Sonic series creative director Kazuyuki Hoshino shook hands with a number of adoring fans in South Korea this weekend during an official community meet-up. But according to reports from the event, he was also teasing something new while he was there too. Quite what that ‘thing’ was though seems up for debate.
The SEGA creative shared a photo on his Twitter page this morning, posing with a group of Korean fans against a “Sonic Official Fan Meeting in Seoul” banner. He attended the event with Sonic Team game designer Eitaro Toyoda. This is the first time we’ve heard of such an event, but we imagine it was set up by the recently-established and incredibly active regional SEGA Korea team.
Rumours started flying around corners of the internet soon after however, when some images and discussion (in Korean) of the event began to surface. Multiple anonymous posts on the Korean site DCinside appear to point to Hoshino teasing some kind of new Sonic project, but none of them seem to agree on exactly what that project actually is.
One account claims that Hoshino has teased the existence of a brand new Sonic the Hedgehog game, whereas others refute this and state that the director was referring more to a social media activity of some kind.
What does appear to be certain is that this project involves illustration/s, and that Silver is featured in some capacity. Of course, recently Sonic Channel published some new artwork of Silver ice-skating with Elise as part of a social media community outreach activity (which you could technically call a ‘game’ if you were so inclined) – so it is likely that Hoshino could have been referring to this instead.
Meanwhile, an English language post on Reddit has surfaced that claims to have translated the discussion and the images to mean that a new game is being teased. Of course, we would recommend you take that post with an extremely large dose of salt, as there does not seem to be anything else that corroborates the claim.
The Reddit user links to some of the Korean DCinside posts as proof, but machine translation of these posts do not match up with the Reddit user’s claims (one post, in machine translation, says that Hoshino was not discussing a new game but simply a “wallpaper”, but the Reddit user characterises this as “illustration for a new game”, which doesn’t seem to make sense).
Whatever the hell is going on, it sounds like Hoshino-san had a lovely time meeting fans in Seoul – and that’s the most important thing, isn’t it? And everyone who attended got the chance to nab themselves an exclusive Official Fan Meeting t-shirt (above) as well! We think it’s great that the creators behind the Sonic franchise have a chance to get out and meet the fans, and we hope this becomes a more frequent (and international!) thing in the future.