Interview: Chris Senn (2025-03-28) by Retro64 and Anonymous

This is an unaltered copy of an interview of Chris Senn, for use as a primary source on Sega Retro. Please do not edit the contents below. Language: English Original source: Retro64 and Anonymous

A: I'm going to preface this with how this came to be. It's mostly got to do with Sonic 3. The Badnik designs in this game look super similar to the ones you had done for X-treme. I'll pull them up right now. Give me a moment.

CS: While you're doing that, I can give you some backstory on that.

A: Oh yeah, absolutely.

CS: I joined Sega - I didn't join Sega proper. I joined a division within Sega called Sega Technical Institute.

R64: Yep, STI.

CS: Not to be confused with a stye that you can get (it's an affliction), but it was… I came from a summer job that turned into a year's worth of work in the middle of college, and I didn't intend to go back, because being in this small game company before STI, I was having so much fun and learning. I met amazing artists and all that. It was so cool, and I thought, "Well, do I need a degree for what I'm doing? Because if I do, I should go back to school." They said, "No, you don't need that. You just need your portfolio to do art." I said, "Okay, that's cool."

When my supervisor and friend, Jeremy Cantor, left - Malibu Interactive was the name of the company - he went up to Sega. Then six months later he said, "Hey, it's pretty cool here. Do you want to join?" I said, "Uh, maybe." I flew up there, had an interview, and joined that company. The way it was sold to me, or described rather, was, "This is the crown jewel of Sega. All the Sonic games get made in this STI division. So you'll be joining an elite squad of really talented people." I thought, "Oh, that's awesome." I was super psyched and excited, and kind of in the prime of learning, because I had come from CalArts, which was a prominent animation - well, a full arts school - in California.

R64: That's really cool. I wasn't familiar with you being from CalArts. CalArts is obviously a very famous school.

CS: It was quite an experience. Unfortunately, I never liked high school, elementary school, and stuff like that. I did the minimum to get by, usually. Sometimes I'd try for grades, but it usually had to do with classes I was more interested in.

R64: That's me.

CS: I always did everything at the last minute. I have some stories about really bad situations that came up as a result of that. Long story short, it was only until I started working at that first video game company where I really felt excited about not waiting until the last minute. Then over the years, I started to do the opposite, where I would over-prepare and spend lots of time and all that. Sort of interesting, between school and practical work life. For STI-

R64: No, it's all good. Any information is cool information.

CS: Sure. Well, hopefully you'll find some use in this, but at STI, what it turned out to be was office space rented on one side of the hall and then on the other side of the hall. On OUR side, where I joined, it was the Western side. On the other side of the hall was the Japanese side, and that was where the Sonic games proper - the mainstream Sonic games, Sonic 1, 2, and 3 - were being made when I joined. There was some connection between the two, like Sonic Spinball. There was collaboration with some of the people on the Japanese side with our side, and there were a few other games that were made with some cross-pollination. I think a few of the artists for Sonic 2 did some background work to help out.

Anyway, I didn't know that when I joined, but I started to realize that as I continued there… To get, finally, to addressing what you're talking about - Sonic 3 Badnik designs. I started to get to know the Japanese side. I was interested in the language and the culture in high school. I got a book for my grandmother, which was written in 1955, called Japanese in 30 Hours, which between you and me is a crock. Basically what it taught you to speak was like a woman, because there are different ways of speaking in Japanese.

R64: Oh, that's how you just came off to everybody?

CS: I wasn't fluent by any stretch of the imagination. I was sort of beginner to intermediate with some things, but I also studied kanji, hiragana, katakana, and different writing. Being an artist, that was super cool.

R64: I'd imagine you'd have to.

CS: It was all very interesting to me. When there was this Japanese side, I was like, "Oh, cool," so I started to speak to them more and connect with them - I'm trying to remember. Oh man, I can't remember his name. I feel so bad about this, but I'm going to have to look it up.

R64: Do you know what their role was? I might be able to tell you what their name was, depending on that.

CS: Yeah, it was an artist.

R64: There are two individuals I'm thinking of right now. Was it Kunitake Aoki?

CS: No, although I got to know him and collaborate - not on Sonic stuff, but we did work together later at Sega. Awesome guy. It wasn't him.

R64: Was it Yamaguchi?

CS: Yamaguchi… Say the full name?

R64: Yasushi Yamaguchi? He made Tails.

CS: It wasn't.

R64: Hmm. The only other person we can really think of is… was it Yokokawa?

CS: Yokokawa? I'm going to have to - let's circle back on this, because we're just beating around the bush.

R64: Okay, yeah, that's all good.

CS: Anyway, this awesome artist who was designing the Badniks… I asked him for feedback on the enemy designs I was doing. There's an evolution of my visual designs for that stuff. Before I spoke to him, I had… Sonic 2. This was before the internet was a thing. You couldn't just look something up. There was no Siri, none of that. There were old files here and there, and some people had a drawing here and there. I scoured magazines to get snapshots of the enemies, the line drawings, but I could start to think in that style by having almost like a mood board of stuff. That was super helpful, but actually it was Yokokawa.

R64: Oh, it was Yokokawa!

A: Just killer, thank you, dude. We've been trying to figure this out for so long.

R64: Yeah, because the thing about Sonic 3's credits is they are not accurate. [laughs]

A: Aoki doesn't even credit himself as the lead. Super weird.

CS: Aoki was the lead artist on Sonic 3. He's written about this a few times in different places. He is not credited at all in that role. He's only credited as the CG artist, and it's a shame.

Would you like to know why?

R64: No one knows who a lot of people are regarding Sonic 3 because the credits were a little inaccurate.

CS: This is my guess - this is not factual, but this would be my take. Back then, there was sort of the lead of the project and then there was everybody else. If you did art, regardless of your stature, I think you would just be considered an artist. Actually, they were called designers, which is confusing, because we have game designer and then, "Oh, so you're a designer. So you design games?" "No, no, I do the art." "What? Wait." There is a difference between Europe and Japan and the United States with titles, for one thing. But also, hierarchy-wise, I think it was more about… honestly, I think if credits were a choice for Japanese titles, my guess might be that back then they might not even have them. Just sort of, "The Sonic Team did it," and that's it.

I think it was - perhaps this could be wrong, but perhaps it was more of a Western influence to actually give credit, because credit is about "I did this;" it's personal. If you look at Japanese culture, it's all about the group. What can you accomplish together? So it's not about personal identity.

R64: Yeah, they didn't. Sonic 1 was all pseudonym names.

CS: There you go. I think that was sort of the influence of Western culture. Interestingly enough, the creation of STI was for the Japanese to have a place to come to the United States and work, and get exposed to Western culture. That's kind of how that all started with Mark Cerny and Yasuhara-san. Those two were instrumental, then hooking up with Naka-san. Naka-san was the most vocal about Sonic, and he rose through the ranks through his ambition. He wasn't necessarily the best programmer, but he had the most charisma. He was sort of the voice of Sonic for years. Then 20 years later, when I worked on - and I say this name with a tear coming out of my eye - Sonic Boom.

Iizuka-san was the voice of Sonic because Naka-san had left. He has long since gone off to do other things. Anyway, back to the art. Yokokawa was so friendly and super cool. We had a little bit of a language barrier communicating, but his points were very clear about the artwork. One of the enemies I designed was the orca enemy, which basically looks like a robotic orca but with rocket engines on the back.

R64: Yeah, I love that one.

CS: That was loosely based on a sketch he did, because he thought - he was giving me suggestions like, "Look, if you're going to have something like a weapon, or an arm, or a head with a mouth that bites, you want to make the graphic more prominent, or the design of that part more prominent - like bigger - so you want to push to be more extreme." Up until that point, I had done like a floppy disk enemy that transformed so it had wings, like it was a floppy case.

A: A big fan of the floppy disk.

R64: I like that one a lot. [laughs]

CS: Yes, they were based on Michael Kosaka, who was our team lead and the designer of the project at the time. His design for Sonic Mars was: Sonic gets trapped in this digital -

[Senn is shown his concept art for the Sonic X-treme Badnik Floppy]

R64: Oh yeah, there it is.

CS: There you go, boom! You and Anonymous with the choreography there. Anyway, the world was all about being trapped in the computer, so I was trying to design things that related to computers. Floppy was one example. As you can see, I had the bulbous eyes that replicated the Sonic-

A: From the Sonic 3 designs?

CS: Yeah, this was before I spoke to Yokokawa. There isn't any part of that design that's really prominent other than, "Oh, I recognize the three-and-a-half-inch floppy disk with the wing." But it's all kind of compact and relatively the same size. If I were to design this today, I'd probably adjust the design and the complexity level of stuff. Once Yokokawa started giving me feedback, it really helped me push certain aspects of the visuals to be more prominent, which ended up feeling more Sonic 3-like, because he was the designer of the characters there.

R64: That's super cool. I just want to say that all of your enemy designs - basically all of the art you did for X-treme - is super beloved within the community. I don't know how much you know about the Sonic community, but people cannot agree on anything. It is widely agreed upon, from all sectors, that your stuff is really great. It's especially loved how well you were able to - and obviously how passionate and how much you cared about what you were doing - to really get that correct style and vibe, and you did it in spades.

CS: Thank you. I tried really hard. I tried to immerse myself in that style as much as possible.

R64: Oh, Anonymous, I'm sure you want to post the Rock the Rock thing now.

A: Oh, the Rock the Rock thing. I'll do that in a moment.

R64: We were basically trying to - we care very much about archiving who did what, giving credits to individual artists, because of how little info - we didn't know if you actually worked on Sonic 3 because of how well you captured that style in your artwork. Then there was this promotional video made for Sonic 3. This is what it said on it.

[Senn is shown Rock the Rock title card which says The Artists: Kunitake Aoki & Chris Senn]

CS: I know, that really pissed me off. If there's one thing I don't like - if this was for Sonic 3 - I had nothing to do with Sonic 3, first of all, let's make that clear. I will say this about any articles you may have read. I know I was in a video where I was being asked, "What do you look for in a character?" or something like that. I said, "The eyes and blah, blah, blah." I looked like I was 12 years old. It's classic when I look back on the video. They were going around interviewing people in the office. Because of my involvement - I'm assuming with the - I don't even know if it was called Sonic Mars at that point - but I was in the thick of designing Sonic-y type stuff. I think maybe the boss or somebody said, "Oh, Christian's really into the Sonic stuff," or "He's working on Sonic stuff." They may have lumped me into Sonic 3, but I had zero to do with that.

R64: That would make a lot of sense. Because there was a lot of confusing crediting on that video. That would explain it.

CS: Yeah.

A: You've got yourself drawing Tiara in there too - not in Sonic 3 at all.

CS: Yeah. That's funny too, because my take is, basically, it's a media company. They're being hired to do a promotional video. They don't know Sonic 3 from Mario versus whatever - pick an arcade game at the time. Maybe they did, but I wouldn't expect them to, because that's not their job. Their job is to go and tell a story. "Hey, ooh, this would be cool if we had this. This will tell a more compelling story and make a more compelling video," as opposed to what's necessarily really accurate. I think there were, in that video, a number of people who didn't have a lot to do with Sonic 3 who were being interviewed about it. It's not to fault the media company and not to fault the people who approved it. There are so many things going on at all levels that the video was like a tiny thing to be made. Unfortunately, with something like that, when people look to it as gospel for properly crediting, it's probably not necessarily correct.

A: Thank you for clearing that up.

R64: Yeah, thank you for clearing that up. We assumed that was the case because, obviously, we try not to ask redundant questions found on your FAQ about what games you worked on. Obviously, that wasn't on the list, so we kind of assumed that was the case.

CS: The other thing too: back in that day, video games were still, quote unquote, "video games." Like, "Oh, you play video games." Ten years later, 20 years later, the industry just exploded and generated more revenue than movies, but in the '90s, it was still an "Oh, you play your little Nintendo or your Sega system" kind of attitude about games. I think because of that cultural viewpoint - I'm not talking about from fans or people who love playing games, I'm talking about just the mainstream perception of it - as a result, I don't think there was as much importance placed on it.

Obviously, the media people who were trying to put this together tried to tell an accurate story to the best of their ability. It wasn't the case where they could write something and then send it to STI and say, "How is this? Is this good?" If the person reading it had any time to say, "Well, there are like 50 mistakes in here, but I only have time to give you the top 10." You don't know how much the media people versus the people in the company actually interacted. That's why something like this can happen, where you've got Kunitake Aoki, who is a prominent artist on Sonic 3, and then my name - like, "Who the hell am I?" Anyway, I think you guys get it. We can move on.

A: I'd like to go back to Yokokawa for a moment. I'm going to post a couple of examples right here.

[Senn is shown three pieces of Satoshi Yokokawa's Sonic the Hedgehog 3 concept art for the Badniks Tunnelbot, Penguinator, Corkey]

A: These guys, right? These are what you were studying for X-treme?

CS: Yeah. I distinctly remember all of these. The way you would draw them, just the designs. They were absolutely inspiring for me with this. I think you can even see how I adopted the-

R64: The rendering style was super similar. The question that we have is: we are super interested in when you posted these concepts for Mecha Sonic Mk. II and Mk. III. I don't know how aware you are of this, but Mecha Sonic Mk. II from Sonic 3 is an absolutely beloved character. They have never reappeared in another video game, and their concept art slash line art slash promotional art has never been shown anywhere. We don't know if concept art even exists for this character.

CS: Okay, and you're wondering if there's any connection between the two?

R64: Yes. We're wondering because of how often - especially now that we know that you had stuff for reference - did you see concept art for this character?

[Senn is shown two pieces of his concept art for the Sonic X-treme character Mecha Sonic]

CS: Okay, did I see concept art for the Sonic 3 Mk. II character? No. Did I even know that it was called Mk. II when I was designing these? No.

R64: This is the character.

[Senn is shown a piece of his concept art for the Sonic X-treme character Mecha Sonic followed by the Sonic & Knuckles sprite of the character Mecha Sonic Mk. II]

CS: No, of course I've seen it since, but one day we're working on it… No, I didn't see that.

R64: Oh man. That's crazy, because the way that you constructed so much of it is so incredibly similar.

CS: Let's take a look at, stylistically, a couple of the elements here, because this is interesting that you brought this up. Let's start from before I even joined STI. I was super into anime, which a lot of people call - [exaggerated] "anime." [in a Southern accent] "Oh, you're into that anime thing." I grew up in high school. That sounds weird. [in a Southern accent] "I was born in high school!" I had found a buddy who bootlegged Japanese VHS tapes. There were anime tapes and everything anime-related, with the exception of the lower-cost stuff you'd see in Saturday morning cartoon shows. The actual OVAs were all imports and absolutely not mainstream. You had to go to like one place in L.A., or maybe two, to find bootleg stuff - posters, if you wanted those. They were not all over the place like they are now or as they've been for a long time, so I scrounged to find all sorts of stuff. When I was in 10th grade, I was picking anime I really loved and then copying it to try to learn the style.

That's why nowadays when a lot of people are up in arms about AI - "Well, it's just combing the internet and stealing styles" - I'm like, "Yes." I get the ethical dilemma that this poses. However, I learned exactly the same way AI is learning: by copying styles. So you've probably seen the Miyazaki-style AI where you can just feed whatever you want - like Walking Dead or Breaking Bad or whatever - into it, and now all of a sudden it's anime. That's how I learned. I have a different perspective, a little bit, from a lot of the artists out there who are really feeling threatened and pissed off. "Hey, you're stealing stuff!" There's a legitimate concern there, and there needs to be widespread governance of all this so that everybody understands what the rules are, because right now it's still the Wild West. I did want to bring up that point. That's kind of how I learned different styles - by copying them. With anime, I did the exact same thing. Before I even met Yokokawa, and before I even thought there would be an opportunity to work at STI, I was already drawing in different styles. It was an amalgam of different things, different inspirations, which I think is what any artist does unless they're really hyper-focused on a style.

A: Does this look familiar to you?

[Senn is shown a screenshot of the Ingram from Patlabor]

CS: Oh, Patlabor? Yeah. It wasn't clicking until you said that, and then I looked and I'm like, "Boom," but yeah, and then Iczer One.

A: With the Sonic Mk. II, for the longest time we were trying to pin down what exactly could have inspired this guy. We found the Ingram from Patlabor and it looked super similar. Whoever put this thing together must've loved that. That kind of traces back to your work.

R64: Yeah. It's really funny - you just ended up having the exact same inspirational set pieces.

CS: Yeah, it's interesting. We all draw from… I look at humans like: you know with video games, how you can have power, endurance, speed, and you can power those up? Imagine if we all had a thousand different meters or dials - everything from our emotional states to our intellectual states, what triggers us, what interests us, what we're afraid of, and all that. All those are little dials. Same goes for things we pick up and remember and use; same thing for styles. So I could very well have used a little bit of Patlabor, a little bit of Sonic, a little bit of plenty of other inspirations that I've had, for sure. If you look at these different designs of the Mecha Sonic, they're wildly different. Some of them are sort of pseudo-Sonic. One of them has drills.

A: Was that inspired by Knuckles? That's what I was thinking.

CS: No, actually it wasn't. I just wanted to explore deadly shapes and something that could - which I know doesn't really relate to Mecha Sonic, but I thought, "Well, maybe this is a new model that…" I don't know what the backstory would have been, but if it's a drill or something, that's pretty nasty. Getting drilled with the head, with the hands, stuff like that.

A: Then you go like, "Oh, it's red. Oh, it's Mecha Sonic Mk. III, Sonic 3 & Knuckles, drill hand, all that."

CS: Yeah. I can totally understand making connections like that because it kind of makes sense. "Of course it would be." I think it's probably interesting to find out what was actually behind the scenes - there isn't a connection.

R64: That's incredibly interesting. It does help us a lot with knowing, because again, we were just completely confused as to what that entire deal was. That's that. This has all been extremely informative and helpful.

CS: Sonic X-tremely? Yeah. [laughs]

The drawing that Anonymous shared with the latest design for the Mecha Sonic has these sort of needle legs. The reason I designed it that way was I wanted the claws, the needles, the blades in the back - all very sharp, pointy, not inviting, and harmful shapes. I also liked the idea that this character floated; he used rockets to propel and would never need to stand on the ground. If it did, it would puncture the ground with those spears. That was the thinking behind the overall designs. As you can see in the upper left, there's sort of a cutesy version, and as you get to the right, it's almost like childhood through adolescence to adult.

That was another actual design phase, or a method of design I used. If you notice in the other enemy designs - the more mundane enemies, not the mini-boss or boss characters - a lot of them were really cute. I was trying to go for a cute style. That's what the style started developing into.

Some of the designs, I'm like, "This looks like a teenager to a college student enemy. I want it to be more like an eight-year-old." Not like an eight-year-old drew it, but like it's an eight-year-old. So I'm like, "Okay." It would have bigger eyes and it would have pronounced features, just like a toddler - that same kind of idea. I used that a lot.

A: I'd like to ask you something else about the Mecha Sonic lineage, and it's got to do with Yamaguchi's Mecha Sonic. Hold on, I'll get the images.

[Senn is shown two comparisons of his Mecha Sonic concept art from X-treme with Yasushi Yamaguchi's Mecha Sonic concept art from Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and the Sonic & Knuckles sprite of the character Mecha Sonic Mk. II]

A: Your Mecha Sonics sort of align with the ones in the games. Was that intentional?

CS: No, I actually did see this Mecha design in the upper right. The claw hands - that did inspire me. I really liked this design; how you could tell right away that it's related to Sonic. But the one in the lower right, that was just a sketch - same with the upper left. These were ones where I'm like, "Nah, don't like them. Keep drawing."

R64: Just because I know they'd go insane if I didn't post it - obviously I mentioned we're a group of artists, and this is what someone in our community has been trying to do.

[Senn is shown a fan 3D render of Mecha Sonic Mk. II]

CS: Oh, cool.

R64: Just wanted to bring that up because I know he'd say, "Please show it!"

A: I hope you can shed some light, but it's fine if you can't.

R64: It doesn't seem like you really had that information. You just had that intuition to make something, which I think - if anything - shows how much you understood the style, which is really cool.

CS: I tried to, and I appreciate the compliments. I just tried my best, and unfortunately that project didn't release. I will say, in contrast to how I may have reached better heights with matching the style, I didn't do that with the game design. There were plenty of failures that I experienced on that project. One of the biggest was that I was young and super ambitious - not ambitious like, "I want to rule the world," but I was like, "Oh, I really love this style, and here are tons of ideas for enemies." Then our leader, Michael Kosaka, when he left a year after we had worked together, he said, "I think you could take on the design for this project." I said, "Really? That seems like such an…" and he's like, "No, I think you could blah, blah, blah." So I was a fish out of water, dude.

If I was management looking back, I never would have let me assume that lead role, but this was a different time in the industry. There were no game schools teaching you how to do game art, let alone the differences between 2D art versus 3D art or game programming. That just wasn't a thing back then.

R64: It's funny, because I just graduated in February - I graduated with a bachelor's degree from Full Sail University in game art. So it's funny you mention that.

CS: Yeah. It was just a very different time, and that meant that, in the sea of candidates, it was much more few and far between to find somebody appropriate to lead a Sonic game for the Western side of the office. It's like, "Well, who are we going to find?" Cause there weren't - of course there were fans, but the fans didn't necessarily know anything about game development. You need somebody who could - I think because of my passion and because I did have skills with art, that was one of the reasons I was allowed to assume that role. But I was much more experienced in art than I was with game design. I was an aspiring game designer. I had lots of ambitions and had designed my own games, but never a professional game, and that lack of experience really showed itself throughout the project.

There were about five or six other major reasons why that project didn't succeed. Personally, that was one of my shortcomings. Although I think I did a good job with the art (or tried to), the game design was either kitchen sink-y, not appropriate to Sonic, or some combination of those things. One of the other major reasons - which is funny, because when you look at successes and failures, rarely are they black and white. There's usually, "Yeah, you succeeded, but you failed with these things," or "You failed, but you succeeded with these things." So there's a mixture.

I met, in the first year and a half maybe, Ofer Alon, who became the lead programmer on Sonic X-treme, and he really liked the initial videos that I created. I'm sure you've seen those - Sonic running around in this tiny little playfield moving about four miles an hour, with different enemies and a checkerboard-

R64: Yeah, those were the ones with the really sharp, polygonal look, right?

CS: Yeah, the low-poly designs. Those were the videos that I presented. I remember sweating and being all nervous, because Naka-san and some of the Sonic Team members were standing in the back of the conference room with the executives and our team. I walked over with the video cassette, the VHS tape, and put it into the VHS player - thankfully not mis-inserting it. It went in the first time, boom, pressed play, didn't shred the tape, played it. Then, as you may have read, at the end of it, some people clapped and some people said, "Eh, that was cool and everything." Of course I felt proud, but super nervous while it was playing, because I had worked nonstop for two weeks - either building one of them or both of them, I don't remember - but I was sleep deprived. I remember when it was done, Naka-san looked at me and said, "Well, good luck."

He knew what was going to happen, which - it ended up happening. Funny how stuff happens, but the cool thing is with a project like that, if you can find people like me who are willing to share stuff behind the scenes for a project that didn't make it, you have people who are interested in that - either interested in the history, or in crediting, or in the actual contents - who can make the dream live on.

CS: This is for Sonic 3, but did they ever have this design in 3D, for Sonic Fighters or anything?

A: Mecha Sonic? No, that's the whole problem.

R64: Yeah, they never - this character only came back officially in the last five years, in a comic book. It's incredibly strange. It's really funny because this character was incredibly popular in the late 2000s, early 2010s in the community. As I'm sure you're probably aware, the comic books are made here in America; the people who were fans of him from fan things - that's why he ended up partially getting into the comic book. It's been a wacky ride.

CS: Yeah. That's cool. Thanks for sharing that.

R64: Thank you for giving all the info. To go to something a little different: in the Rock the Rock video, it was shown that STI, in their offices, had a maquette of Sonic made by - I want to make sure I'm trying to say their name right. Give me a second. Made by Taku Makino. They also made one for Knuckles. We do not know if the Knuckles one ever made it to America. They said they shipped it and then they never saw it again. Also, the Sonic ones - even though you can see there are many copies - according to Naoto Oshima, the creator of Sonic, they are all lost. As someone who at least interacted probably with the Sonic ones, do you know anything about these? They are basically holy grails of the community, but they are completely lost.

[Senn is shown images of promotional Sonic the Hedgehog and Knuckles the Echidna maquettes]

CS: Yeah. Hold on one second. I'm looking for something. One moment, I'm going to share something.

R64: Okay.

[Senn links a Google Maps link for Sonic Drive-In]

A: What on earth? Oh, maps for Sonic Drive-Through…

CS: [laughs] Yeah, that's a fast food restaurant called Sonic. Sorry, I couldn't resist trying to throw a little monkey wrench in. You're like, "Ah, woah, this is where it ends. This is where the rainbow ends. This has all the lost Sonic maquettes. Is that the Area 51 of maquettes?" So, I do recall there being a large Sonic statue in Sega, but I don't remember if it was at STI or in the main lobby. I honestly can't remember, although there are probably some photos somewhere with somebody posing in front of it.

R64: These were pretty small - like the size of an average water bottle. You could hold them in your hands.

CS: Oh, okay. Yeah. I never saw those.

R64: Interesting.

CS: I definitely did not see a Knuckles one. Whoever ordered it never received it. I hope they kept their receipt.

R64: Okay. I was just interested because they were seen in the offices in the Rock the Rock video, and I thought maybe you would have known. It's okay though. Just a shot in the dark.

CS: That's something I could see the media people doing - "Oh hey, can we use this statue in the room behind you? That would really help sell the whole Sonic thing." Then that's it - that person maybe owned it, left the company, and that was the end of that. That's probably how something like that happened.

R64: Thank you for your answer. I want to know next: as a 3D modeler, I'm super interested - what was your process for designing the actual 3D models? As an artist I absolutely adore that era; all of us in our little group do. The '80s and '90s CG stuff. I'm curious - were they made using polygons?

CS: [old man voice] "In my day, we had rocks!" No, it was all polygons.

R64: It was all polygons. Interesting.

CS: I used software on an Amiga computer called Imagine 3.0. That's what I used - interestingly enough - at that small video game company immediately prior to STI. At school I used SGI machines.

R64: Oh, that's so cool. I love Silicon Graphics computers.

CS: Yeah. Later at Sega I ended up using them again, years later. On the Amiga, Imagine used polygons for all modeling - splines were only used for paths for movement, not for actual modeling. For modeling a head, for instance, the best way - there was no ZBrush back then. Coincidentally, Ofer Alon, the lead programmer on Sonic X-treme, created ZBrush and was a visionary-

R64: I was going to ask about that later. I use ZBrush all the time and I wanted to get some questions in.

CS: Yeah, Ofer is making his own game, by the way.

R64: Oh cool, I didn't know that.

CS: Anyway, that's another story. Back to Imagine and the Amiga - if you wanted to model a head, there was no sculpting capability. I'm not even sure if there was mirroring yet, which for you is just like, "What?"

R64: That's rough.

CS: You'd have to - I think you could copy and paste and then invert on the X axis, but then you'd have to flip the polygons and stuff. The way I would build a head would be as if you took cross-sections horizontally across the face, and then shaped the silhouette for each of those cross-sections and then skinned them together to create the polygons, and then hoped it was pretty close. Because if it wasn't, you'd have to unskin them and then do it again. If you tried to manipulate the polygons once they were part of the face, it was really hard to get out the kinks.

R64: So it was like a sort of Boolean process, I'm assuming.

CS: No, that would have been even more advanced. Boolean is like cutting away or augmenting. With this, it was more the case that you just had to model it the way you wanted it.

R64: Interesting.

CS: That was it.

R64: You brought up Silicon Graphics computers. Obviously I like them a lot. I tried doing this in that style.

CS: That's awesome. I remember when Michael Kosaka was still leading the project and we were pitching Sonic Mars, the executives who came in were talking about our game. "So how are we going to compete with Donkey Kong Country, which had just come out? That look of 3D - can we get that with this game?" And then we were like, "No, because we were going to make flat-shaded polygons, like you saw in the demo video, like Virtua Fighter, that kind of thing."

R64: Is that where this came in?

[Senn is shown his Sonic Mars 2D isometric gameplay mock-up image]

CS: This was done maybe a year and a quarter, a year and a half into the project, where Ofer was building the engine for Sonic X-treme. It was still early days, but I wanted to try to come up with something like a visual guide. I modeled those palm trees - modeled a palm tree as a sprite and then used it throughout the environment.

R64: So I'm assuming this was just a mock-up. This wasn't a tech demo?

CS: It was absolutely just a mock-up.

R64: It's a very nice mock-up. Always liked this piece a lot.

CS: Thanks.

[Senn is shown his Sonic Mars concept art for a mine-themed Zone populated by T-Rex Badniks and Mecha Mite]

R64: To another realm of X-treme: what on earth was this whole sort of bio-mechanical aliens plot with Mecha Mite and all that? I'm thinking about that a lot. What was up with it?

CS: This was part of me thinking about game design - like a boss encounter. I was like, "Okay, this would be like a mining level that leads up to this Mecha Mite." This is kind of running through how I thought it could proceed. There are notes in here: "Remember wind." Wind was part of the elemental configuration. I've always been interested in that. In fact, I'm doing that in the game I'm designing now, where water puts out fire, fire burns wood, that sort of thing. Wind was the element designated for Sand Gully.

You can see there are some raised sections in there, and that would end up leading to like a broken-down mining town. The T-Rex design I had done for the enemy - I thought, "Oh, it'd be cool if they're all broken-down T-Rexes, machines in this mine shaft that you'd have to walk through." Of course, at some point, one of them awakens and the rest of them awaken, and you have to fight and all that.

This was a lot of conceptual ideas. You can see the boss would rear up at the top middle and then it would spit oil wads at Sonic. Just trying to spitball ideas for the initial inspiration for what the level could be. In the bottom right, Diamonds Are Forever was a James Bond film. There was this scene where - I think there were oil tunnels, these long 50-mile stretches of underground tunnels that were large, like you could walk in them. There was a machine that would go through - I think it would scan for damage in the pipes - it was almost like a little railroad car thing that would go through [the tunnel], and there were sensors that would almost spark on the edges as it went through. I thought that would be a cool scene, you racing through this tunnel and then maybe being pursued by one of these things. A bunch of different ideas, basically.

[Senn is shown two of Fei Cheng's Sonic X-treme pre-renders alongside two Saturn V08 gameplay mockups, all featuring visible atmospheric haze]

R64: Regarding this - it was noticed throughout a lot of the different stuff shown off in X-treme that the game had a bit of a moodier, ambient vibe. Sometimes people describe it as a little creepy, in the way that the enemies and Badniks were designed. Also, your pitch music - a lot of it is very ambient and movie-like. Was any of that direction intentional? What was your process for directing the art the way it came out?

CS: An example would help me get more specific, but I will say while you're looking for that: in general, what I was hoping for was - I really liked Sonic 1. That was kind of my inspiration. I just felt like Zelda 1 for the NES is my favorite Zelda game, even though I've played tons of modern Zeldas. Just the level of complexity really achieved a nice, finessed balance that wasn't too complicated and offered a variety of experiences - some good textural differences between exciting speed versus thought-provoking puzzles versus whatever. That's kind of what I was going for with Sonic X-treme, but I was also definitely influenced by Ofer's development of the editor, which initially was like a cube world that you could build, but then he implemented paths that could end up doing amazing things. Those would inspire me to change my vision for what the game could be.

In terms of the moodiness and all that, I wanted there to be a variety - there could be the classic Green Hill Zone, Emerald-type place that's bright and happy, but then there could be dark places that were more creepy and take you through different emotions and feelings, so that when you think back on a level, you can really remember a distinct combination of sights, sounds, feelings, and gameplay.

[Senn is shown fanart of Mecha Mite]

R64: It's really neat to hear, because obviously it's something we've been talking about. The person that actually made that Mk. II model thing - they wanted to show they did this Mecha Mite.

CS: Oh, that's cool. Yeah, I like that rendering. That's neat.

R64: I love that. I love to hear that.

CS: The first four images that you shared - Fei created the first and the last one. It says by Fei Cheng, but he never played a Sonic game. He was a really good artist, so I would describe to him what I was looking for. The image he created wasn't exactly what I would have described to him, but I ended up working with him to come up with something like this where I'm like, "This is cool. I don't know if we can do this, but it's very moody. I feel like this could create some emotion." This is the mine cart level - like broken mine carts. You can see in that first image, this sort of shaded tower with the stones and stuff. Very early concepts - it wasn't indicative of what it would end up looking like. It was more for inspiration than anything else.

R64: No, that makes sense.

CS: The second image [Saturn V08 gameplay mockup featuring a checkerboard ramp and Sonic running towards a large yellow mechanical Badnik] - this was a hodgepodge of crap. I hate this image, but I was trying to solve a few problems in one image because we didn't know what the game was going to look like. What's the sky going to look like? "I don't know."

R64: This one actually - there were a few seconds of a video clip of it. Was that a tech demo? Was it actually an in-engine thing?

CS: Really? There were a few seconds? I don't even remember.

R64: Yeah, it was like a few seconds long. Nothing really happened. It was just Sonic running down that little path.

CS: In the second image with the red-

R64: Yeah, in the second image with the rings and Sonic.

CS: Interesting. Did it have the octopus boss, the yellow one?

R64: Yeah, no, this is actually a screencap from that. He was just walking forward.

CS: Oh, that's funny, because I remember mocking this up in - I don't know if it was Photoshop or-

R64: If it was anything, it definitely was not an in-engine thing?

CS: Oh, absolutely not.

R64: Okay. Interesting, because it was theorized that this was like a really early in-engine test because of the way it was presented.

CS: Yeah, it does look like it could be, but I just don't recall. It's possible. Regardless of whether it was or not, there was no long-term technical validity to it. It might as well have been a mock-up video or a still shot. I will say that with confidence.

The next image [gameplay mockup featuring checkerboard walls and two yellow platforms] - I just mocked this up. I was trying to imagine what could serve as walls to keep the player in, to provide boundaries to the world. Then how would that maybe look with some platforms? Very rudimentary - like, what do trees look like? "I'll just start with very simple shapes."

R64: Was this all made in that Acquire program?

CS: In Imagine, you mean, on the Amiga?

R64: Yeah, in Imagine. Sorry.

CS: Yes. I may have touched up - not on this image, but definitely on the image above it. Then the next image was another one, like the first, where I was describing crystal frost - a cold place. Think of Superman's Fortress of Solitude, that sort of thing, which didn't really come through in this. The colors were nice and it kind of had a mood and atmosphere, so I'm like, "Cool. We could use that as inspiration for actual level stuff."

[Senn is shown two pieces of Sonic Saturn concept art for the Badnik Cybernik alongside a prerender of the Wetlands stage from the same project]

A: Yeah, this cybernetic guy. He's kind of an enigma to me. He appears in a few concept pieces for X-treme, but we've got like nothing on him. I'd like to know if you're familiar.

CS: I don't know who F.H. would be. Is that what that is, for the signature in the line drawing?

A: Oh, is there a signature in here? Oh yeah.

R64: Oh man, yeah.

CS: Is it F.H. or F.M.? I can't tell. F.M., it looks like…

A: Yeah. It looks like an F.M. You've never seen this guy?

CS: No - well, I think I did. Is this for Sonic X-treme though?

R64: Yeah.

A: Yeah, this is for X-treme.

R64: You can see on the right, where Sonic is running, you can see a silhouette of his head on that fortress in the back.

CS: Hmm.

R64: This might have been something unrelated, because I think this project was called Sonic Saturn. Maybe that was past your time being involved.

CS: No. Sonic X-treme had five different names. One of them was Sonic Saturn. This piece on the right - because this doesn't even look like Ross Harris' Sonic. This looks like something else. I don't remember being involved with this at all. I don't know where this came from or what it was for. This style of drawing… Do you guys have a list of employees of STI by any chance? In my FAQ there were different names. Do you happen to have those names you can just dump in the chat?

R64: [searching] Let's see - I'm trying to find… There are so many places, things everywhere.

CS: Because this looks like John Duggan's style, or maybe Bob Steele's. I don't know if that character is the one depicted in that "ghost carnival with the platform with fog" image.

R64: What did you say - just to write it down - what did you say the person's name was that you think made this?

CS: This looks to me like it might be John Duggan's art style.

R64: Just writing this down for notes. None of this is credited to a specific artist.

CS: Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm like, "What is that? I don't even know if this has anything to do with Sonic, honestly." I see a picture of generic Sonic from somewhere else stuck in there, but that looks like something John Duggan might've done. These line drawings may have been early concept stuff, but this second image - with the Sonic, the weird sort of Plato stick-figure Sonic running from right to left, and then another smaller version running under that roofed-wood platform section towards that thing in the background - I don't know if that is the character depicted here. For one thing, the scale is completely different. That thing in the background is like a hundred feet tall, whereas in the line drawings, Sonic is-

R64: Yeah. It was assumed that it was maybe an Eggman slash Robotnik thing, where they decorated it with a giant version of their face.

A: Yeah. Looking at it here - "Sonic Saturn." Very weird.

CS: That's Ross Harris' Sonic's face there for the Sonic Saturn. Let me visit the link and see here… Sonic Pool. It's Peter Morawiec's game. How did I not - it's P.M., duh. That's Peter Morawiec. Yeah. He's the visionary behind Comix Zone - absolutely his style.

R64: Ohhh!

CS: Yeah, okay. I got it. That background is for the scrolling. When Sonic X-treme was really in trouble, management was trying to find ways to just get a Sonic game done. They contracted Peter and Adrian, who had started STI South in LA, to design a Sonic bonus round. That's what this was. That's mock-up art for it.

R64: Interesting. Speaking of Comix Zone - just wanted to get your thoughts on it. I don't know if you're aware, but they announced they're making a Comix Zone movie. I know you worked on that game. Do you have any thoughts about that?

CS: I think that's cool. I'd be interested to see what they do with it. I hope it doesn't turn into another vapid, shallow movie based on an interesting concept, because Peter had a great concept with that game. As long as they push the whole idea of - I don't know how you would do that in a movie, unless the whole movie is literally comic strip after comic strip.

A: It's kind of a concept that benefits from being a side scroller.

CS: Yeah. Is it going to look like Mortal Kombat, but more sophisticated, where the character's running through and jumping between comic strips throughout the whole movie? Or are they going to completely abandon that, have it for like three seconds in the beginning - "See, it ties into the original Comix Zone" - and the rest of the movie is just normal? That would suck. I hope if it actually gets made, they try to stay true to the concept of what made it cool and execute on that.

R64: Yeah. Speaking of movies - I don't know how much you would really even know about this, but were you aware that there was a movie in the '90s being developed that was using Sonic X-treme as a major plot point?

CS: Really? No.

R64: Oh, that's really funny. It was a pitch film.

CS: Was it called Jackass? No, I'm kidding. [laughs]

R64: It was called Sonic: Wonders of the World. It was about a kid who would be getting the brand new game, Sonic X-treme. Sonic and Eggman slash Robotnik were going to escape out of Sonic X-treme into the real world. It never happened, but I was just curious if you knew anything about it, because obviously it was about the game you were leading. If you're interested, here's a little write-up about it on the Sonic Fandom wiki.

CS: Oh, that's classic. Yeah, that's cool. It's neat to see stuff that comes up. Too bad they couldn't make it - or maybe it's a good thing they didn't.

A: Probably a good thing.

CS: Yeah. It was an interesting idea.

[Senn is shown his concept art for Sonic X-treme's Tiara Boobowski in battle armor]

A: Getting back to X-treme for a moment - what's up with this? I love this concept.

CS: This is around the same time, or shortly after, I was doing those Mecha Sonic designs. I thought, "Well, what if when Tiara goes into battle, instead of that little skippy outfit she wore in the original designs, what if she actually had badass armor on - sort of like Metroid?" That was a thought, but it never got past that.

A: Yeah, I really like this and I've never seen it being talked about before, neat.

[Senn is shown his colored concept art for Sonic X-treme's Tiara Boobowski standing beside a group of large pineapples]

R64: Speaking of Tiara - this is gonna sound really funny. There's this one picture that's been talked about a lot. Can you explain what "life is like a pineapple patch" means?

CS: Yeah. I don't remember exactly when I did this - maybe 2010, 2012, 2013. I took the original picture that I had drawn and colored it, then added a bunch of pineapples. To answer the question "What the heck does that mean?" - it was a joke based on some context from a conversation. I don't know if somebody was talking about pineapples or whatever, but then I posted this. Y'know - life is a pineapple patch.

R64: Okay, there you go. It's interesting to know it came from that era, because this was believed to be an actual piece of art made during the game's development.

CS: Oh, no, no. It's just a joke. That's one thing I really enjoyed - I created the forums on my website so I could answer a question once and not be asked 10 or 20 times by different people. I could help more people more easily. Then it turned into a community, and one of the fun things about the community was just riffing on stuff people would say. They'd make a joke or whatever, then I'd go make a picture and post it. That was really fun.

R64: That's really funny. Well - life is like a pineapple patch.

A: Alright, next X-treme oddity. Here we go.

CS: Got it. Oh! [laughs]

[Senn is shown his Sonic X-treme concept art for Sonic holding Santa's sack and hat]

A: What's up with this guy?

CS: This was… I think I joined - I can check here. I think I joined STI in October or November of '93. Let me see. My resume… Let's set the Wayback Machine to… way back. Here we go. No, it doesn't show what month. Anyways, it was before Christmas, so I was sending a Christmas card to my family.

R64: Oh, interesting. That makes a lot more sense. The only source online is people going, "Oh, maybe this was used for the Christmas winter level."

CS: No, no, it wasn't used for any actual level. It was me still learning how to draw Sonic and trying to capture his attitude.

R64: You draw a great Sonic, by the way.

CS: Yeah, thanks. This is him. Who do you think is in the sack? Probably Santa Claus. Sticky, dumbass Santa Claus. That was me, having him be "super attitude," like an angsty teenager.

A: That's fun, I like that.

CS: He's still festive with his little hat.

A: He's already got the boots on.

[Senn is shown a pre-render of Sonic facing a floating mechanical boss, taken from the header of Senn's Sonic X-treme Compendium]

R64: Last little oddity: on the front page, you had this render and I don't think there was ever a full one posted. What was the context behind this?

CS: Yeah. This was an illustration I did for the PC Sonic pitch. After Ofer and I basically became ostracized from the rest of what had become Sega of America Product Development - it was no longer STI, that changed - Ofer and I were continuing with Sonic X-treme development while the rest of the company was working with Point of View, the technical director's company that he had started and brought forth as a possible solution to finish the Sonic game, because they really wanted one for Christmas.

Nakayama-san [Irimajiri] had come from Japan and he had seen what that side had been making, which was like a really old version of Sonic's editor - or Ofer's editor - basically just blocks, brick-making, no pads, no robust - you've seen the videos with the pads and stuff - it didn't have any of that. We had that because we were working separately, and it had advanced a long way. But he saw that and just hated it. Unfortunately, because of politics - because all of his entourage was there and all the executives and Sega of America PD [Product Development] were there - him crapping on it just meant, "Anything related to this gets no more money," or, "Just stop."

Ofer and I… I still remember that moment. This is a regret in my life - not a huge one, but career-wise, it was a regret. Ofer and I were in his office and we had to get to the meeting, and he was coding something just to tweak some part to polish it. I'm like, "It doesn't matter. Nobody's going to care. Let's go. We're going to miss our meeting." He kept typing, and I thought, alright, I'm going to go meet him there. I ran off just in time to get outside the conference room door, where there was this explosion - pissed-off executives and the entourage walking down the hallway.

I was like, "Well, wait, aren't we going to meet with -" Then Manny Granillo, the executive producer, just looked at me and goes, "I dunno, dude, we'll figure it out later." It was basically a huge bomb that had gone off. I'm like [pained sound]. Then Ofer came huffing and puffing, sweating with his PC under his arm, and he's like, "What's going on?" "We missed it." "What do you mean we missed it?" I said, "We're too late."

I was thinking, "Just like I said we would be," but the moment that I regret was - I did see Nakayama coming out of the door. This wouldn't have gone over well anyway, but I regret not having the nerve to speak to him in Japanese and say, "We have something to show you." That was just me being too timid. The energy was so negative; I think that was the main thing that threw me off. Maybe if I'd said that, it might have softened a little bit - but I don't think so. I think because he was so pissed off, plus he would look like, "Who are you and why weren't you part of the main presentation?" Why should I talk? There were just a whole bunch of reasons why it could have gone off the rails. But that was a clincher moment. That was the fork in the road - meaning we (Senn and Alon) could no longer continue developing Sonic X-treme for the Saturn or anything else.

We tried, as a last resort, to cater to the PC market, which is what Ofer had been designing this on the whole time, with the intention of porting it to the Saturn or anywhere else. This illustration - sorry, that took five minutes - but this illustration was part of the storyline. I think it started something like: Sonic was dashing through the snow, making a jump, and came across this. That's the moment where it's, "Oh shit, Robotnik's back."

R64: Yeah. I'm assuming that's where all of those - I forgot the name of the artist you said made the pre-rendered ones used for X-treme.

CS: Peter Morawiec? Oh, for the - Ross Harris.

R64: Yeah. Ross Harris. I'm assuming then this era of development is where all those more polygonal Sonic and Tails models that you posted were from.

CS: Yeah, yes. The ones that had sort of the mesh, that blended in with the models of Sonic, Knuckles, Tails…

R64: It's interesting that Sonic model was used in that super early one of him running down the path.

CS: Yeah.

R64: Thanks for clearing that up. That's been something we've been wondering about. Actually, that friend of mine that I told you about - I think we probably connected over X-treme. That's really cool to hear, finally getting the answers to that.

[Senn is shown two images from the 2021 comic Sonic the Hedgehog 30th Anniversary Special featuring Sonic X-treme cameos]

To brighten the mood a little bit - you probably weren't aware of this, but for Sonic's 30th anniversary, there was a comic written by Mauro Fonseca? Apologies if I'm mispronouncing his name - it's written by the McElroys. That was a big celebration of Sonic's past. There were two references to Sonic X-treme in the comic.

CS: Oh.

R64: You can see there's the character based off of the professor driving a car.

CS: Yeah, Boobowski.

R64: There's a little sign to visit Jade Gully. This ended up getting into the official Sonic comic book.

CS: [laughs] That's cool.

R64: Thought you'd just want to know that, because I'm sure you probably weren't aware of it.

CS: Yeah, I wasn't. That's fun. Thanks for sharing.

R64: Just to show that all your work never truly got forgotten.

A: I think Tiara made an appearance as well, but don't quote me on that.

CS: I think she did, in some form or another. I will say that Ross Harris was instrumental in bringing the 3D visuals of the characters to life in the way I had really imagined. It took some back and forth, but eventually we got the materials right and the lighting right, so that Sonic had this sort of reflective sheen on him, and when metal was supposed to be metal and rubber was supposed to be rubber and painted metal was supposed to be shiny - we got all that to the point where I was super happy with it. Ross did a-

A: Yeah, it did pay off.

R64: It looked really good.

CS: Yeah. He did a great job with the animations too, really nailed it.

R64: That was all Ross Harris then?

CS: Yeah. Then I would just make sure that the model - the posing and the proportions - matched what we were going for. I was going for the classic Sonic, more of the classic Sonic with the finger up in the air - like that sort of thing, and Sonic 1 - a mixture between those. Because this was the first time Sonic was going to be in 3D, so it was important to try to get that right, along with the rest of the game. And you know what happened with that, but yeah.

[Senn is shown five pre-renders of Sonic the Hedgehog: two of his own from Sonic X-treme, two Sonic X-treme renders sourced from Sonic 3D Blast, and one from the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 prototype's title screen]

R64: Question regarding the model. Obviously, in promotion, there were renders of Ross's model. Late in development, the box art promotion shifted to this model.

CS: Yeah. I think that may have been grabbed from 3D Blast.

R64: Was this ever planned to be shifted into the game, or was it just for box art purposes?

CS: No, none of these. There was a marketing department that could get a hold of the 3D model and then pose it, so they-

R64: You wouldn't happen to know who made this model?

CS: No, I have no idea. That second one looks like an opposite of cross-eyed Sonic - one eye is looking in one direction and the other eye is looking a little out to the right. He's a little derpy Sonic.

R64: It's actually believed that - I guess we'll have to do some further digging - Aoki made the initial revision of this model, because it's very similar to the one he made for Sonic 3.

CS: Hmm. He made a model for Sonic 3?

R64: Yeah, that's actually the only thing he was credited for in the final game.

CS: Oh, for the bonus round, not for the main game.

R64: No, he did the model that was made for the title screen.

CS: Oh! Yeah, yeah, got it.

R64: This one. This is from his portfolio website, yeah.

CS: Not in the actual game.

R64: No, it was not. Speaking of that - do you still have contact with him?

CS: Aoki-san?

R64: Yes.

CS: Last contact was about two years ago, but we've kept in touch over the years. He lives in Washington with his family.

R64: Yeah. I was just curious, because we've tried to reach out before and he has a lot of different emails out there. We just don't know if we haven't found the right one, or what the deal with that is.

CS: If it's any consolation, I've probably reached out to him three times, maybe four, and haven't gotten a response.

A: He's got a lot on his hands, then.

R64: Yeah.

CS: Or he doesn't check his email. Whatever.

R64: Okay. Because at first we were worried that we were bothering him or something.

CS: Nah, that's the beauty of email. If you don't have time to respond to it, you just leave it.

R64: Yeah. That's helpful to know, because we were worried - obviously we don't want to bother the man about something 30 years ago. It's good to know we haven't made him upset.

CS: I'm sure you have not. If somebody wanted to block an email - you know what I mean? There are a lot of things somebody can do. Don't worry about bothering somebody.

R64: Okay. Yeah. Obviously we try to go about this really respectfully. We don't want to bother anyone.

A: I'm going to assume you don't, but do you have any contacts on Yokokawa?

CS: No, I haven't spoken to him since back in the Sonic 3 days.

A: I thought so.

R64: Yeah, that's fine. Honestly, even just the confirmation of who did it is pretty huge.

A: I'll sleep sound with that.

R64: The last thing I really had to ask about was: what was the experience working with ZBrush? Because I know you worked on some small things and helped out. Did you ever expect, working on that program with Ofer, that it would turn into such the industry behemoth that it is today?

CS: I remember sitting on a plane with him - I think we were flying to Vegas for a show - and he told me about the concept. He said, "This is what I want to make. My vision is for this to compete with Photoshop." Because at the time there wasn't anything like it. This was before he even started coding anything. When I met Ofer at Sega, instantly I'm like, "This guy's a genius" - super talented. The demonstrations he had of his code stuff were super cool. He really liked the early videos that I had created. We bonded really quickly, and for the next two years we were at each other's side, like hours every day, talking about stuff to build into that editor. What I saw him create with the editor, and how robust and extensive it was - it would have taken at least another year, maybe a year and a half, to make a proper game with a team working on it. Even though the editor was super powerful and you could do all sorts of stuff really quickly and iterate quickly - changing colors, textures, pathways, triggers - it was super robust, it was awesome. That gave me the confidence to know that what he was setting out to do was going to be something really special.

In the beginning days, there was the money guy, separate from the development, and then basically three to four main people. One of the people was prominent - one would go to trade shows and demonstrate the product. There was a chief operating officer, and then there was Ofer, and then myself. We all wore different hats because it was the beginning of a business. My role was to provide feedback as an artist for the tool, and if I had ideas for new tools or different things to be done - I recruited a few other artists to use the tool to help create artwork to promote the product.

I wrote tutorials, created the first ZBrush forum online - it was called ZAcademy. I would demonstrate the product live at trade shows. I'd take a sphere and then build a face in 30 seconds, and people would be like, "Woah!" That's going to attract attention, help sell the product. I would create artwork for advertisements and tutorials for CG Magazine and stuff. I would mentor people in the community, answer questions, and in general be an evangelist for the program. I'd provide customer support. It was a lot of work for all of us for different reasons. Ofer was the visionary behind this. He also coded like 98 percent of the whole thing - 100 percent, for years. Once ZBrush became a globally used product, it was a lot of work for all of us. Every studio for movies and games and even advertising - that came from nothing. There were no users, and then it became a globally used program. That's an amazing accomplishment, both from a visionary standpoint - realizing a product and building something that users really enjoy and relied on and looked forward to improvements and new features - but also from a business standpoint; achieving global reach was astounding. Am I surprised that it reached that? No, actually, because it's Ofer.

It wasn't just Ofer, too. Jaime Labelle was the chief operating officer, Jack Rimokh was the money guy. There was a guy who did the trade show narration for a lot of stuff. There was another guy in the warehouse who would help set up for the trade show and everything, and the other people involved.

R64: The work you all did - thank you. You really did change the industry for the better, I think. It's a program I could not live without for certain things.

CS: It was an honor to be a part of all that, for sure.

[Senn is shown three fan 3D renders of Vector the Crocodile]

R64: Yeah. This is just for shits and giggles - just related Sonic stuff. I made this in ZBrush.

CS: That's awesome. [laughs] That's great.

R64: See the CG inspirations - you gotta have that too.

CS: Yeah.

R64: Gosh, I honestly think that is it. Oh, actually there is one last thing.

A: I had something else to go with.

R64: Oh, okay.

CS: Let's go for one last point each, and then we'll wrap it up.

R64: I'm sorry. This has been a bit long.

CS: No, no, it's good. If you have future questions, you can always ping me on Discord.

R64: Okay.

A: That's wonderful, thank you.

CS: Thank you.

R64: Anonymous, you ask your question.

A: Oh, all right. This is circling back to Sonic 3 - you said you'd never seen any sort of concept drawings for Mecha Sonic in that game, right?

CS: I don't recall. With the exception of the one with the wheels that I called out.

[Senn is shown three screenshots of the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles bosses Kyodai Eggman Robo, Fire Breath, and Hey Ho, followed by a pre-render of the Sonic Mars boss Linebacker]

A: We call that one Mk. I. Does that also apply to the other bosses from this game? The giant Eggman robot, the fire breath, all that? You've never seen those guys?

CS: No, I saw those in-game, but didn't see concept art for them separately.

A: Yeah. That's what I meant. Interesting.

R64: It seems like what you're saying is the only things you saw were the basic enemies.

CS: Like I said, this red Eggman boss there - I saw that, and these influenced me for sure. I was inspired by the designs and stuff. There was a football boss. I don't know if you've seen that - that I designed. The look wasn't inspired so much by the red Eggman boss here, but yeah. This wasn't complete, obviously. There were arms and stuff, but the rockets would propel it and would basically knock you over, and Eggman would be inside. These helped inspire me, for sure. The game graphics you're talking about.

A: You interpreted them extremely well.

R64: You really did.

CS: Thank you.

R64: The last question I really have is: if you had the opportunity, would you be interested in working on a Sonic thing again? What would your direction be, and what would you try to do?

CS: Honestly, nowadays it would be really hard to find the time. Practically speaking, it would be a challenge, but what you're describing is what Sonic Boom represented to me. The reason I joined that company - Big Red Button Entertainment - was to get a chance to close the chapter of Sonic in my life, because Sonic X-treme had remained open and got canceled. I really wanted to finish a Sonic game, but I was really interested in this one in particular because the vision for the game was "stronger with your friends." That simple statement just made my imagination explode. Working with your friends in a cooperative Sonic game, real time - that sounds amazing. I want to explore that.

The first year and a half of Sonic Boom's development, I did exactly that. I learned how to visual-script - which I'd never known how to do before - with the Crytek CryEngine, and prototype stuff on my own and with programmers. That was super cool. A lot of different ways of working together with another player. Here are some examples. One of them was running through tubes - a classic staple for a lot of early Sonic bonus games. As you're running through the tubes, you're running on the inside of the tube, obviously. You and your friend are running at the same rate and you can move all the way around, 360 degrees, around the inside of this tube. You're connected by an energy cord. This came from the concept of the creative director and the lead designer - this energy connection between characters.

I thought, "What if you could use that to collect stuff and destroy stuff?" I prototyped this in fast-moving tube stuff where you and a friend could move anywhere and this cord would connect between you. If you moved the cord to intercept rings, you'd collect the rings. Imagine rings being diagonally - one, two, three, four, five, six or something. One of you would have to be on one side, the other on the other side, to line up with those and collect them.

The same would go for enemies that you could destroy. You'd have to line up to destroy the enemy in the tube. It was super fast and it was fun. Then there was other stuff - like one character running on this treadmill-like device that had to fend off attacks. As you ran on the treadmill in one direction, it would rotate a wall segment that another character was climbing on, which had spikes around them that they needed to navigate carefully to get to a spot. You had to work together to do that.

There were a whole bunch of other vehicular things you could play together, and this weird contraption where-

R64: This is all interesting now, because the reason we didn't ask much about Boom is because there are so many things already out there, and we thought we had all of the information. None of this is really known. This is all really cool, actually.

CS: Yeah, it was really ultimately disappointing, but there were a lot of really cool things. I built this simplistic knothole that was huge. Literally imagine a 50-story-tall knothole with basic concepts for gameplay that could take place. This was your home base where you could run up the tree and get to stuff on branches, and things could happen with the tree. An attack on the tree, it's burning - ala Avatar, with the big - I forget what it was called, the spirit tree or whatever, when it got nuked by the ships. Different ideas for a lot of cooperative stuff that you could do together.

Then as luck would have it - did you guys ever play… oh man, why am I blanking on the name? Rayman Legends?

A: I've not played it, but I'm very familiar.

R64: Yeah, I'm familiar with it too.

CS: It came out about three or four months after I had come up with some of these really compelling cooperative game mechanics, and they had them in there in the finished game. It's like, "Oh, damn it. They got there first." Not all of them, but some of the key ones - and they implemented a really great game. That was a little disheartening, but I thought, "Well, they did it well. It's proof that it's fun. We should keep on this track."

Long story short, with that game, there were shifts in who was leading what. Sega and Nintendo were working together on this project with us - which is funny because for Sonic X-treme, they were adversaries, but just goes to show how 20 years later things can change. We were running out of time and money, so decisions were made which ultimately chopped all of the awesome cooperative stuff from the game and focused it on a single-player game that you could also play with a friend. That's why you have the [sarcastically] "Hey, let's work together. I'll stand on this pressure plate." "Oh, I'll stand on the other pressure plate. This is so fun." And I was like, "Oh my God, this is… Ugh." It was very disappointing.

Some of the reasons it was a struggle were that we were developing for a new hardware device - the Wii U - which wasn't finished yet, so we didn't have all the specs and we didn't necessarily have versions we could run that were bug-free. That was really hard. We were also working with an engine that didn't work optimally with the target platform's restrictions in terms of technology - how many polygons you could display and all that stuff - because CryEngine was built to be more like a Call of Duty-type thing.

R64: That's something that's known - that it wasn't really made for the Wii U, and then it was kind of shifted to it.

CS: Yeah. Then there was the fact that Nintendo and Sega were building this huge launch plan where our game would tie into another game being made, that would tie into a TV show, that would tie into a whole new toy line. They didn't have the toys designed, so we were designing the game, and they'd come back with, "Well, could you add these vehicles in the game?" And we're like, "Dude, we're shipping in six months. How could we?" We tried to work with a lot of competing requests and demands while running out of time. Had the decision not been made to make this what it ultimately turned out to be - bugs aside - I don't know if the game would have shipped, honestly.

Here's another tidbit for you. I'm going to share a video with you - let me look for it after the call, because I don't know if I have it readily available. We were about six months from shipping, and before that I had brought up, "Where's the speed in our game?" I saw lots of combat being developed, puzzles, but where's the speed? The reaction I got was unanimously, "Well, we're not making a classic Sonic game." And I'm like, "Yeah, but it's Sonic. How are we going to deliver something without speed?" At one point - I kid you not - one of the pitches for this game was, "This is going to be the slowest Sonic game ever."

A: Really?

I was like, well, it's because it was going to be working with your friends, stronger with your friends. If we nail that, then okay, I could understand there being some allowance for, "It's not the fastest Sonic game," but you can work with your friends. There'd be something to latch onto. Ultimately what we created didn't do either.

At that time, there was no speed in the game, so I said, "We've got to get speed," but there wasn't a willingness to really spend time pursuing that. I just said, "Screw this." I set out for a week and engaged one of the junior designers I was mentoring to complete, in two weeks, a demo. That's what this video is that I'll share with you. What I wanted to do was say, "Look, this is not the best, but we can do it if we set out to do it." Once Sega saw that, they're like, "Yeah, yeah, we need that." I'm like, "Of course we need that." Then I started to get support for that, but the only support I got was one junior designer and one junior programmer in a room together.

My role was just to get speed in the game. There were something like 35 different speed sections, plus three vehicular sections, in six months. That includes bug testing and stuff - which is absolutely ridiculous. I had to design a level in half a day, which means laying it out in a couple of hours. From start to finish, what's the concept for the speed level, including what gameplay is going on in this speed section? Where is it going to take place? How does it relate to the story, which wasn't even necessarily done yet? That was super hard. Then implementing - I think there was a total of maybe a week, maybe a week and two days, to finish the level. It was crazy - insanity to try to get that done.

Unfortunately we couldn't do everything we needed to, because the underlying technology relied on stuff we didn't have. If we did have it, there were bugs in it, and the rest of the team was so swamped trying to get the rest of the game done that these bugs that had been there for months were just not getting fixed.

The artists would get the level and it would work. Then the next day it broke because something changed somewhere in code. Then the artists started saying, "All your stuff is broken that you give us." And I'm like, "No, it's not. When we handed it off, it worked." So there was a lot of stuff going on while my focus ended up being, like I said, just trying to get these speed sections out. However crappy they were, there wouldn't have been any if I hadn't really pushed for that. I'm glad I did, because imagine that game without speed in it.

A: Yeah. There are already so sparingly few speed sections in it.

R64: Yeah. I'm sure - well, just so you know, beforehand I didn't know how this was going to go. I made sure to get in contact with someone I know at Sega to make sure, if there was anything to get permission on - if you had shared anything - to share it publicly, because I don't want to get anyone in trouble for that sort of thing.

CS: Yeah. I don't know. The video might be pushing it because it's not something I'm aware of being publicly released, but I'd be happy to share it with you guys just for your own personal use.

R64: I'd say you've done a great job just talking and explaining. I'm still waiting on their response - they're saying things take a few days. If they give the yes, that would be something really cool to see. Otherwise, completely fine. You've done a really thorough job explaining it and given us a really good idea.

CS: I will say something else. Every single thing I've said to you is my own perspective. Obviously, for journalism and such, the best way to get a more complete picture of a story is to get as many different inputs as you can. I just tend to be the more willing one to share over the years.

R64: Yeah. Again, very appreciative of you being willing to do that.

CS: Sure, but my point is I'm happy to help because I know what it's like to be wondering and then, "Oh, cool," learning about stuff behind the scenes. But the reality is there are always different sides to a story. Anything you've heard me say is just my own perception of things. If you speak to somebody else, it might be very different. I want to caution against - whatever I say is not gospel.

R64: Of course, of course. That makes sense.

A: Alright, I've got one last question.

CS: Sure.

A: This is a very personal one. Were you ever particularly inspired by this?

[Senn is shown Mecha Sonic Mk. II's Sonic the Hedgehog 3 charging sprite with its orange chest eye exposed]

CS: I don't remember ever seeing that.

A: That's all I needed to hear.

CS: I love the design, but…

A: Because this thing haunts me. How does he even work?

CS: Why does it haunt you?

A: Okay, it's kind of a long story.

R64: Yeah. Let's just say low-resolution pixels with a character who completely changes his construction and anatomy can be frustrating. Trying to figure out how it works.

CS: Oh, I see. Yeah. That's one of the issues I had with Michael Bay's Transformer designs. These used to make sense when they transformed, but now you're just doing whatever. "Yeah, it transforms from this to that." If you saw the toys that came out, they're not at all like the movie. It's cool what's in the movie and very different, and I get the whole rebranding, but in terms of a thing that actually works… [exasperated sound]. I don't know if that relates to what you're saying.

A: Oh, it totally does.

R64: Oh no, it totally does. The thing we're trying to figure out is how to actually make this work, because a lot of the designs for things that were done were contextually things that made sense.

CS: Yeah, yeah, I get it.

A: Lifting up his head, right? Then his shoulders come up with it and you've got the eye showing. It's a lot.

CS: Yes. If someone is trying to build this in 3D - "How do we sort this out in this instance?" - I had a similar process. When I designed a game that I still want to do, it was called Skorch, S-K-O-R-C-H. It never came out, and this was back in the late '90s, early 2000s. The idea was: I want to make a game that distills two types of gameplay down to their basic essence. One is driver and one is gunner. I want them to work together so that you can do cool stuff.

One of the characters was like a one-wheeled motorcycle that had a gun mounted in the front. The other character was a robot that had a gun and could run. The robot would run slower, the motorcycle would move faster, but if you work together, you can move faster and have greater firepower - all about cooperative team competition. You versus another team, and you could have another team, three teams, four teams, whatever. It's like capture the flag; that was basically the game. That evolved into actually transforming robots, and this is the related part: I couldn't wrap my head around - even though I've built stuff in 3D for years - "How do I get stuff to transform?" That's so freaking complicated in my brain. How do I get something that I want to look like this to turn into something that looks like this? I bought a bunch of Legos, started building stuff to early-visualize how to do it. I built stuff in 3D based on the Lego stuff. Then I started to get it - this process of, "Oh, okay. How do I…?" I could have a helicopter that transforms into a robot. I could have the helicopter look cool, and I could have the robot look cool, and these were techniques to actually allow me to transition between those two. Which is part of why, when I saw Michael Bay's Transformers, I'm like, "What, come on!" Just having stuff fly out from anywhere.

A: Are you aware that Shouji Kawamori - the Diaclone guy - he actually built his designs out of Lego as well?

CS: Oh, no, that's cool.

A: You've got the original Optimus Prime, the Diaclone toy. There was likely a Lego prototype of that.

CS: Oh, that's super cool. It makes sense because whether you construct this stuff out of popsicle sticks, wood, Legos, or whatever, it's a way to visualize. That tactile feel. It was a good way for me to try and wrap my head around a problem. I have appreciation for designs I see that really work well. I've gone through the pain to try to get there, so I appreciate just the amount of genius involved with really good designs.

[Senn is shown the Sonic & Knuckles sprite of the character Mecha Sonic Mk. II alongside early Masaharu Hesori concept art of the character Battle Convoy]

A: Yeah, that's why I connect with the Mecha Sonics and Transformers so much. It appeals to that.

CS: That's cool. We have that in common, for sure.

A: Cool robots. I love cool robots.

CS: Thank you guys. I appreciate having the chance to blab about stuff from the past. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask. I would ask that if you do want to quote anything in particular or share stuff related to our conversation specifically, you run it by me first, because what I don't want to do is -

A: Spread misinfo, yeah.

CS: Yeah, spread misinfo. For instance, Ofer and I were co-designers on the project. I want to make sure he gets credited appropriately if we talk, because a few times you mentioned me leading the project. I was kind of leading the project and kind of not. Ofer was also kind of leading the project. Then when we split up, there were different leads. It wasn't cut and dry - "Chris Senn was leading the thing." I certainly had a lot of passion for a lot of stuff, but yeah. I just want to make sure nobody's toes get stepped on.

R64: Of course, yeah. We'll run anything by you before anything is posted publicly. I've got the whole thing recording. The only thing I just want to get confirmation on before we leave is: from what you remember, it was Yokokawa who made all of the designs.

CS: Yokokawa.

R64: Yokokawa. Sorry.

CS: Yeah, yeah, that for sure rings a bell. Now, granted, it was 30 years ago, and [old man voice] "I'm getting older!" So maybe I could be wrong, but I really don't think I am.

R64: Okay.

A: He was credited.

R64: Yeah. Thank you very much. I hope you have a good rest of your day.

A: Thank you.

R64: See you around, I guess.

CS: Yeah. Yeah. See you around like a circle. Just go ahead - if you do have any further questions, I'll answer them as soon as I can. It was a pleasure meeting you both. Thanks for your thoughtful questions. Thanks.

A: Thank you. Have a good rest of your day.

CS: Thank you, you too. Bye bye.