Happy 10th Anniversary to Sonic Boom, the Failed Reboot That Heralded Sonic's Lost Decade

On this day ten years ago, in a glitzy media space in New York, the world was introduced to Sonic Boom, a brand new branch of the long-running Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. With branded games, comics, cartoons, many merchandising and licensing deals and a lot of marketing budget behind it, this was intended to be an all-encompassing cross-media initiative that sought to revitalise the blue blur for a new generation of kids.

The 6 Feb 2014 event was billed as a “renaissance” that would kick off the “Year of Sonic” - but instead it would become the day that marked the beginning of a long, lost decade for the franchise.

The colossal failure of Wii U exclusive ‘Rise of Lyric’ left fans with next-to-nothing to play for several years, as SEGA scrambled to rescue its most-treasured IP with rushed projects and outsourced works that leant heavily on the brand’s “legacy” - something that the company had just tried so desperately to move away from.

But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. At this time, ten years ago, there was no such panic within SEGA, and not nearly as much consternation from the fanbase. The community reaction, in fact, was one of stunned curiosity. The reveal of Sonic Boom was incredibly surprising at the time - not least because of the unique redesigns that Sonic and friends were rocking. Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Amy all came with brand new kicks and accessories (including an industrial amount of sports tape), and proportions were tweaked to varying degrees (Sonic got taller, while Knuckles got… bigger? In the… chest?) in order to make them look contemporary for a Western (read: US) audience.

Also fascinating was the gung-ho effort by SEGA America to fully commit to a trans-media offering for the Sonic franchise. The blue blur has made - and will continue to make - appearances across all manner of different media, obviously, but Sonic Boom would be the first time that a consistent universe would carry across branded games, comics, TV and potentially even movies.

US developers Big Red Button and Sanzaru Games were tapped by SEGA to develop the first set of video games in this new world, and no expense was spared in getting these projects off the ground - with headliner ‘Rise of Lyric’ reportedly assigned some $20 million in budget. While fans were having a time trying to adjust to this bold new direction for the franchise, it at least could be said that the Wii U exclusive was looking incredibly good in its initial reveal, with the game reportedly running a version of CryEngine 3 specifically made for Nintendo’s cursed console.

On the very same day, a trailer for a branded TV series was also revealed (and it would be this arm of the sub-franchise that would ultimately stand the test of time, with a successful comedy angle for the show and writing that got increasingly great [and weird] across the two seasons that followed) as well as a range of tie-in merchandise in partnership with TOMY. Indeed, Sonic Boom was ripe for the licensing, with SEGA America fully intending to rightfully milk that cow until the end of time with many, many more partnerships confirmed over the course of the next year.

Of course, as we all know now, during the rather chaotic year that was 2014 things started to quickly fall apart. Impressions of Rise of Lyric at E3 were not super positive, with the realisation that Sonic’s design wasn’t the only factor where Boom had deviated from its SEGASonic (or “legacy”) counterpart. Gameplay appeared to follow a rather generic ‘Western action-platformer’ formula, with weird ‘Enerbeam’ swinging gimmicks in place of a traditional Sonic moveset and a focus on character-swapping and puzzles over high-speed action. It later transpired that the Wii U was not quite powerful enough to onboard the aforementioned CryEngine 3 tech either, so graphics and game features ended up taking a nosedive over the months leading up to release.

The game, which was a key factor in Sonic Boom’s overall brand success, crashed and burned by the time the review embargoes lifted (you can read our review on our archive site here, but other media outlets were much less kind to it). Add to that an associated title on Nintendo 3DS, ‘Shattered Crystal’, that suffered similar negative feedback, and you had a verified disaster in the midst of a new IP’s flagship year. The fallout was so bad that in the fiscal quarter that followed, SEGA sheepishly reported to investors that the Sonic Boom games were among the worst-selling Sonic titles in the entire franchise’s history.

Unfortunately, once the games themselves proved to be duds, the rest of the cross-media initiative came crumbling down. An Archie Comics book was announced in July 2014, and ran for only eleven issues before being cancelled. The toys would continue for a little while longer - likely owing to licensing contractual obligations - but it never reached the heights that SEGA America intended, with in-store concepts discovered in 2015 that suggested a complete Sonic takeover of toy stores had the Sonic Boom series become successful. 

About the only thing that remained by the end of it all was the Sonic Boom CG animated series, which was beloved by the community and won itself a second season before its time was up. That premiered in late 2016, alongside the third and final video game in the Sonic Boom franchise (if you don’t count the branded Sonic Dash sequel that SEGA HARDlight released a year prior), titled “Fire & Ice” (which itself was delayed a full year from its original intended release of 2015).

It was a sad run for an ambitious “sub-franchise”. But, while SEGA reps went to great lengths back in 2014 to insist that Sonic Boom was not intended to ‘replace’ the old Sonic continuity, there were signs that in practice this may not have been entirely true. For the three years that followed, the Sonic Team studio took a back seat from practically all association with Sonic the Hedgehog, with its release schedule limited to mobile spinoff Sonic Runners (which, while interesting, only lasted a year with SEGA calling the project a total failure).

The lack of any viable options from the “other branches” of the Sonic franchise, coupled with the share of voice Sonic Boom enjoyed, meant that SEGA America’s pet project was inevitably the de-facto “new face” of the IP, despite comments to the contrary. In reality, Sonic Boom was not just “a new direction” as told by producer Stephen Frost, but “the new direction”, with non-Sonic Boom branches openly considered as part of the franchise's “heritage” instead.

Perhaps most telling of this point of view came from comments made by then-SEGA producer Omar Woodley back in mid-2015:

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"Sonic Boom is meant to branch away from the classic/legacy Sonic. Our plan is to go forward with both the modern Sonic and the legacy Sonic, but the Sonic Team will handle the legacy side of things in Japan.”

Indeed, until 2017 if you weren’t interested in Sonic Boom there was simply nothing interesting to play. In the gaming world, Sonic was in the doldrums. In fact, for years the Sonic social media team had the unenviable task of carrying the entire marketing for the brand, distracting a bored community with nothing but memes (a frankly herculean task that was nonetheless executed so masterfully that the Twitter account ended up growing to millions of followers) until SEGA could action a fallback strategy.

The focus on Sonic Boom (along with the subsequent lack of high profile Sonic Team projects in tandem) and its resulting failure led to SEGA America taking the unfortunate decision to downsize, restructure and relocate its Western business, and the company did not showcase or announce any new titles at E3 in 2015.

Later that year, SEGA Games CEO Haruki Satomi even stated that the company had "betrayed" its fans:

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“We did our best to build a relationship of mutual trust with older fans of Sega, but looking back, there’ve been some titles that have partially betrayed that [trust] in the past 10 years.”

SEGA Europe’s Jon Rooke added that; “SEGA has publicly apologised to the fans as the quality of console games in the Sonic franchise hasn’t been acceptable over recent years.” Whatever was going on, it clearly seemed that SEGA felt like it needed to engage in damage control.

In 2016, Takashi Iizuka spoke up about the future of the franchise, and talked up the possibility of Sonic Team making a comeback.

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“Because [Rise of Lyric] tried a different take on Sonic from the norm — and considering the results — this made Sonic Team feel that we want to build a Sonic title which represents the evolution of the Sonic series over the last 20 years.”

The years that followed brought us Sonic Forces - which despite a reported long development time gave the impression that it was rushed to fill a void left by the collapse of Sonic Boom - and Sonic Mania, a critically-acclaimed title that in spite of its honors was a project outsourced to indie developers.

Arguably, it would not be until 2020 - six years after the announcement of Sonic Boom - that the Sonic franchise would start to pick itself back up. The advent of the surprisingly-fantastic Sonic the Hedgehog feature film from Paramount Pictures restored a lot of energy and good will for the IP and within the community, and ironically brought Sonic to the new and extended audiences that SEGA America originally intended to reach with Sonic Boom.

In 2022, nearly nine years on from the New York reveal, Sonic Team returned to the fore with a new concept in Sonic Frontiers. And the consensus on this seems to be that, while it is rough around the edges, its approach has great potential and could flourish in a follow-up with the right design direction.

It truly feels that now, a full ten years on - and thanks to a lot of hard work from SEGA, Sonic Team and the Sonic Brand team - there is a lot to be positive about with this franchise, with plenty of interesting and exciting new games and projects on the way.

But with all that said, is it right to say that Sonic Boom was a complete and total failure? No, I don’t think so. For all of its faults, the sub-brand did do a number of things right. For one thing, the Sonic Boom cartoon remains a favourite for many this day, with fans often mourning the casual and quiet non-renewal of the series. Producer Stephen Frost also concluded that Sonic Boom in general was a success from a licensing and brand awareness perspective, which cannot really be argued when you remember the long-lasting line of toys and merchandise that kept Sonic in the mainstream’s consciousness.

And it was ahead of its time in terms of helping SEGA understand Sonic’s prominence in the West as opposed to Japan, with Iizuka moving to the US in 2016 and establishing the Sonic Brand team out of SEGA America’s offices, where a good majority of brand decisions are now made.

A lot has been written about how Sonic Boom fared and where it may have gone wrong over the years, but one thing is for certain - its reveal and its ambition was most definitely interesting. How do you feel about the overall series, ten years on? And what are your fondest/"fondest" memories of Sonic Boom?

Happy 10th Anniversary, Sonic Boom (the franchise)!