Sonic Year in Review 2023: The Blue Blur's BUSIEST Year Ever

They say a lot can happen in the space of a year. And boy, has that never been truer than the events of the last 12 months! In 2023 alone, Sonic the Hedgehog fans have been able to enjoy no less than three major brand new games, four meaty DLC expansion packs for two other games, at least five IDW specials (alongside the monthly comics), a number of animated projects and several hundred thousand* merchandise collaborations (including a significant one with LEGO). And that’s just the stuff SEGA was directly involved in!

It truly has been an incredibly busy year for Sonic, with enough new material out there to satisfy almost every kind of blue blur fanatic - Modern, Classic, Shadow, Comic, Cartoon, Art-heads, Merch hunters and even the Sonic Retros. The sheer volume of Sonic content that has flowed in 2023 has been non-stop - almost aggressively relentless, in fact. It’s been tough for the Sonic News team to stay on top of it all, truth be told!

But we’re finally here, at the end of this magnificent journey we call ‘2023’, ready to attempt to roundup the biggest stories of the year and contextualise it all for you. We thought 2022 was busy, but boy we were not prepared for just how jam-packed this year has been. This truly has been Sonic the Hedgehog’s busiest year yet.

* Might be an exaggeration.

The Big Story

It’s difficult to condense a year’s worth of news into one contextualised narrative when the news was ‘EVERYTHING HAPPENED’, but if 2022 was all about ‘convergence’ and unification of the Sonic franchise across all mediums, then 2023 clearly illustrated the fruits of those efforts - from both the game development side and the brand marketing side.

The sales success of Sonic Frontiers led the way on this, with news about the game’s continuing performance becoming a regular occurrence during SEGA Sammy’s quarterly fiscal briefings. As of November, the open-zone adventure has racked up over 3.2 million copies, making it one of the best-performing Sonic the Hedgehog titles ever. Alongside this, the entire franchise has moved 1.6 billion units as of March 2023.

SEGA Sammy believes that these very impressive numbers have been achieved, in part, thanks to its successful partnership with third parties to amplify the Sonic brand in other mediums. Most obviously, the Paramount Sonic movies no doubt helped revitalise the franchise in many people’s minds, but the company also points to its collaborations with Netflix, Minecraft, Capcom and others to push what it called a “successful transmedia strategy” - an effort that began in 2020.

Thanks to Sonic’s silver screen stardom - and the resulting successes that followed - SEGA Sammy believes that its flagship IP is now on a high, with its future looking incredibly bright. Sonic brand director and Sonic Team lead Takashi Iizuka was promptly promoted to an executive-level position within the company, and there is an eagerness to replicate the same turnaround performance for SEGA’s other dormant brands.

The publisher ended the year by announcing that it would be reviving five more of its classic IPs, including Jet Set Radio, Golden Axe and Crazy Taxi - some of which are rumoured to also get movie adaptations, just like Sonic. SEGA has proudly claimed that Sonic’s renewed fame was the catalyst for many of these retro revivals.

Sonic the Hedgehog helped put SEGA on the map in the 1990s, and it’s kind of poetic that he seems to be doing it all over again in the 2020s, some 30 years later. With the ‘New Era’ and the imminent arrival of its ‘Super Game’ in 2025, the next year could see SEGA truly transform its fortunes, if it’s able to fully replicate its success with Sonic.

So... Many... Releases!

To say that 2023 was a good year for Sonic games would be the understatement of the decade. SEGA and its content partners were firing on all cylinders this year, with an incredibly generous amount of products to play, read and watch.

First, the games. Sonic Team made good on its promise to deliver three substantial content updates to 2022’s Sonic Frontiers, starting off with a set of new audio and visual modes, leading into a Birthday Bash package containing new challenges. The final expansion added an entirely brand new alternative story experience for the final Starfall Island, and while it was incredibly hit-and-miss it was nonetheless an impressively involved effort for a free DLC.

With Frontiers releasing just last year and Sonic Team’s focus on expansion content in 2023, we would have understood if things ended up being quiet for the rest of the year. Instead, we got several nice surprises. Takashi Iizuka and original Sonic designer Naoto Ohshima teamed up to bring us a new Classic Sonic adventure in Sonic Superstars (see our review here). SEGA HARDlight came out of its mobile gaming shell and launched a 3D platformer on Apple Arcade, Sonic Dream Team (our review on that here).

Even the Sonic social team clubbed together and released a free game on April 1, in the form of The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog. And to top it all off, 2022’s Sonic Origins compilation also received a substantial upgrade with Sonic Origins Plus, adding new playable characters, challenges and the complete archive of 8-bit Game Gear Sonic the Hedgehog games. It continues to get updates to this day.

Even in terms of games alone, 2023 has been an exceptionally packed year - but add in everything else that released and it’s clear that we’ve all been spoiled rotten. Netflix launched Season 2 of Sonic Prime (and millions of hours of the show were watched), IDW continued its run of Sonic comics alongside a number of specials (covering Winter, Summer, Halloween, Amy Rose’s anniversary and Sonic’s 900th adventure to name but a few), LEGO released a series of Sonic-themed toys, and there were many licensing partnerships between SEGA and Igloo, Hypland, Numskull and Crocs among others.

The Sonic Community was responsible for a lot of action too - Noah Copeland added extra content to his ambitious Sonic Triple Trouble 16-Bit project, an episode of SatAM was lovingly re-animated, a trailer for a fan film featuring Shadow the Hedgehog was released and a Sonic mod project, Hellfire Saga, was finally completed after five years of development.

However you enjoy and celebrate Sonic the Hedgehog, you can’t argue that there hasn’t been something for everyone this year.

"It Belongs in a Museum!"

The last 12 months haven’t just been good fun for fans excited about the new Sonic stuff, either. No, 2023 has been a tornado of interesting new developments in the retro Sonic scene as well. Archive artwork and assets have consistently dropped over the last year - everything from old Sonic CD storyboards, Sonic Mania concepts and McDonalds toy sketches, to early Tails art and sprites, high quality Sonic X-treme screenshots and packshots of cancelled PC ports.

Former Sonic Team designer Satoshi Okano even got involved by sharing some concept artwork of characters and pieces he made for Sonic Jam and Sonic Adventure, with the latter solving an age-old niche mystery surrounding a previously unknown ‘Spider’ character. Speaking of Sonic Adventure, a pre-release version of the game was also uncovered, known as the ‘Tournament Disk’.

Perhaps the biggest surprise this year in this area concerns a game that everybody thought was already tapped for prototype material - Sonic the Hedgehog 2. With the help of the Video Game History Foundation, new concept art and documents not only unearthed us more details about the scrapped ‘Cyber City Zone’ stage, but the VGHF was able to recreate (to a best estimate) a portion of the level itself! More contextual information regarding the game’s early ‘time travel’ concept was also revealed, it’s super fascinating and well worth the watch.

British Sonic fans who grew up in the 1990s will also feel blessed about the return of another long lost figure in 2023. The original Sonic the Hedgehog statue from London’s old SEGAWorld was discovered and loving restored by none other than… SEGA themselves! The restored statue went on something of a grand tour in the second half of the year, including Gamescom (with spinning globe and everything!).

Honestly, all the above doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the archive material that has been discovered this year - stuff like the Rocky arcade game, dumps of SEGASonic Cosmo Fighter, the return of the original 1990s Sonic hot air balloon in the UK and the discovery of Sonic and Tails in the original Fighting Vipers arcade game - but if I wrote about it all we’d be here ALL DAY!

Events Madness

2023 was also a big year for Sonic-related events too. Top of the list here was clearly the launch of the highly anticipated World Tour of the much-loved Sonic Symphony, which began in London and Los Angeles to critical acclaim and is now charting a course to spread musical cheer across the globe. The concert’s frontman, Shota Nakama, has an incredible energy and creative talent which can be seen in every stage performance - the event is clearly made with a lot of love for the Sonic series and we highly recommend experiencing it!

Beyond Symphony, SEGA also partnered with restauranteur Andy Nguyen and the Secret Sauce Society to launch a series of pop-up themed diners, called the Sonic Speed Cafe. We went to the premiere of the first location when it arrived in San Diego and loved the experience and the creativity of the menu, and there’s currently a second pop-up operating in California until February.

In Japan, Sonic took residency at the country’s famous Fuji-Q theme park, with characters from the series taking over the venue’s announcement recordings and a ‘Sonic Square’ set up to promote various games and activities. Sonic also popped up at Tokyo Game Show and the Tokyo Toy Fair (for some reason), and SEGA kicked off a special pan-Asia ‘fan meeting’ tour across multiple countries where fans could get some face time with Jun Senoue and Kazuyuki Hoshino.

Sonic fans have always clubbed together to celebrate their favourite franchise in many different ways, and in 2023 this was more apparent than ever. Alongside classic online events such as Sonic Amateur Games Expo and Sonic Hacking Contest, retro community fans were represented as the 2000s webmasters of Sonic Stuff Research Group came together at the Retro World Expo to host a panel about their experience at the start of the modern Sonic web. A range of interesting fan conventions were also held, such as Sonic the Comic Con, Sonic Fan Fest, Sonic Expo and Sonic Revolution.

There was absolutely no way anybody could have been bored as a Sonic fan this year!

Unionize!

We’d like to end this roundup on a hopeful, humanitarian note. We’ve all enjoyed, chatted about and hyped over the huge volume of Sonic the Hedgehog content released in 2023, but it’s important to also recognise the people behind these projects, who work tirelessly to bring us all the games, comics, shows and more that we fans constantly demand, collect and play.

If you look at the state of the broader video games industry in general, it is easy to see that 2023 was a sad and uncomfortable tale of two halves. On the one side, it was a very positive year in terms of game releases - but on the other hand, constant reports of mass layoffs and abusive treatment of employees at major publishers brought to the fore a depressing reality behind all the flashy trailers and shiny game boxes.

Sonic projects sadly didn’t escape this trend, with Roblox developer Gamefam (best known in our community for its Sonic Speed Simulator project) settling in court with the National Labor Relations Board over complaints concerning pay discussion. The studio has also faced accusations relating to pay, development crunch and communication since late 2022.

Luckily, SEGA has so far avoided being included in such depressing headlines, but that day may yet come. In refreshing news, a number of SEGA of America employees voted to have their rights protected by a new union (the “Allied Employees Guild Improving SEGA”) partnering with the Communication Workers of America. However, while SEGA’s corporate response was initially positive, there are fears that the American office will still see layoffs in early 2024 - with reports claiming that the company is strong-arming unionised members and side-stepping the AEGIS organisation entirely.

It would be a poor start to the new year if any of this comes to pass - much of SEGA’s success in recent years (including with Sonic) can be nailed down to the people working hard on these games, in every department. There’s still time for SEGA to reverse course on this decision and better respect the efforts of all in their company.

While we hold out hope on that, we think that SoA’s employees’ movement to unionise is an inspiring message for all game industry employees working in the current landscape, and we hope employees at other publishers follow suit.

What Were Your Highlights?

So, that was the year that was! So much happened in 2023 that we couldn't possibly cover it all, but hopefully we've done a decent enough job of bring you the abridged version. Let us know in the comments what YOUR highlights of 2023 were!

And from all of us at the Sonic Stadium to all of you, we wish you a very Happy New Year and a prosperous 2024! Cheers!