Developers from the Sonic Frontiers team have shed some light on the project’s road to release, revealing that in many ways, it was a make-or-break moment for the series.

Sega Of Japan sat down with three developers on the action-platformer, which marked the Blue Blur’s first time zipping across an open-world setting. With such a drastically different, bigger structure than previous outings, the pressure on the team was at an all-time high.

According to translations from designer Yuki Takahashi, the game took five years to fully make with a maximum of 120 developers working on it. While experimenting with a new ‘open-zone’ structure for Sonic, the team was supposedly ‘filled with a sense of crisis… we have to create something new… if we fail here, there will be no chance.’

Sonic The Hedgehog would have likely continued in some form, regardless of Frontier’s success or lack thereof. But had Sonic Frontiers underperformed, future titles could have seen an even more limited scope or budget. Thankfully for momentum-cravers, the opposite happened: Sonic Frontiers propelled the series to its ‘biggest year’ ever. Publisher Sega then announced that its sequel would enjoy an even bigger budget. ‘I would like to use the knowledge gained here to further evolve the reborn third generation of Sonic,’ programmer Yuki Mitsuishi says. Hopefully, the bigger budget facilitates that.

What does that ‘third generation’ entail? Well, presumably more open-world Sonic games, no more pixel art entries for a while, and, probably, more films. Sonic The Hedgehog 3 opens later this year, featuring a hopefully moody Shadow and Jim Carrey’s return as supervillain Dr. Eggman.

See what else is coming up, with our new games of 2024 guide.