Sega announces two new Sonic titles for 2017, invents multiplayer field-of-view system

“Sonic the Hedgehog at the 87th Annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2013” by Anthony Quintano. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

If you haven’t noticed by now, the 1990s have come back in a big way. Surge citrus-flavored soda is once again available after having been re-released last year by the Coca-Cola Company (NYSE:KO). An album from the rock band blink-182 hit the top of the Billboard charts this summer. Video game enthusiasts all over the world are spending hours on end trying to catch the digital monsters known as Pokemon on a portable device, albeit in a slightly different game format.

Another throwback from ‘90s popular culture will return to the spotlight next year and it’s a good bet that the brash-talking, high-speed hedgehog in question cannot wait. On July 23rd, Japanese video game developer Sega (TYO:6460) announced at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con that two new major Sonic The Hedgehog titles will be released to consumers in 2017.

The first of the two releases will be Sonic Mania, a game being developed for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC platforms. The game will offer a truly retro feel with a few new touches. Players will direct Sonic through a two-dimensional environment reminiscent of Sonic games going back to the early 1990s. At the same time, players will also be able to explore new Zones, the term used in Sonic for different in-game worlds, new Acts, a series of levels within each Zone, and new villainous bosses. Players will also be able to take advantage of a new Drop Dash mode which appears to allow Sonic to carry a dash charge through a jump and continue the dash after coming back to the ground.

Sega also announced a second title that will be available during the 2017 holiday season. Details were light but the company did acknowledge that this title will be developed by the same team which created the Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations titles. This title will be available on the same platforms as Sonic Mania as well as the portable Nintendo NX console.

Sega holds a portfolio of 283 active U.S. patents according to the patent portfolio analysis tools available through Innography. The text cluster posted here shows that game devices receive the brunt of the company’s research and development focus although image processing and virtual spaces are also areas where Sega is showing some interest.

An improved multiplayer experience for Sonic games is at the center of U.S. Patent No. 8834269, titled Program, Game Device and Method of Controlling the Same. It claims a non-transitory computer-readable medium storing game instructions, a control means arranging a viewpoint and first and second characters in a virtual three-dimensional space and a rendering means projecting the first and second characters present in a field-of-view range from the viewpoint to a two-dimensional plane to create a game image. The system is designed to keep two video game players who are playing cooperatively within the same field of view even when one player has much greater skill than the other player and has gotten much further ahead in the game. This addresses a problem in which a player with less skill would fall so far behind that they wouldn’t be displayed on a screen, increasing the difficulty of making jumps or getting past other obstacles. Diagrams attached to the patent clearly show that the technology is very likely part of the Sonic The Hedgehog franchise.

An innovation which would seem to have a place in Sonic’s Special Stages, where the hedgehog runs through a 3D environment to collect rings and other bonus items, is reflected within U.S. Patent No. 8556718, which is titled Game Machine and Movement Control Method of Character. The patent protects a game machine with a game control means for controlling a character to move along a path set in a virtual 3D space and a special movement process means for moving a character which is in one path into another path adjacent to the path it’s taking while maintaining the same speed. The innovation is meant to address player frustration caused by erroneous movements which can cause a game character to fall into a hole or contact enemies which, as the patent notes, “spoils” a player’s mood.

Sonic is enjoying a good deal of popularity before its 25th anniversary commemorative Sonic Mania game comes out next year. Along with the two new titles, Sega also announced that the endless runner mobile game Sonic Dash had surpassed 200 million downloads. To celebrate, Sega unveiled Classic Sonic as a playable character and added a Green Hill Zone, the first zone of the earliest Sonic games, for a limited time. Sega also confirmed that Sonic will be getting additional screen time in season two of Sonic Boom which should begin airing on Cartoon Network this fall.

The most recent earnings report for Sega, released in early August, indicates that the company is also very involved in the sale of pachinko and pachislot machines. Pachinko is a type of vertical pinball machine within which players shoot a ball to the top of a game board and watch the ball cascade down through pins, hoping that the ball reaches the right location when it hits the bottom. Anyone who has watched the Plinko game on The Price is Right has seen a version of this game. Pachislot is very similar to slot machines seen in the West, although players have the ability to stop each column individually instead of hitting one stop button for all columns. In the first quarter of its 2017 fiscal year, Sega sold 29,000 pachislot units and 20,000 pachinko units and increased its net sales in this division by 114.8 percent over 2016’s first quarter.

Despite this growth, Entertainment Contents was Sega’s most profitable division during the first quarter, netting the company ¥46,700,000,000 ($463.6 million USD) in sales during the quarter. Major performers in this sector were Phantasy Star Online 2, a multiplayer action and role-playing game which broke a server record this May when 130,000 users simultaneously accessed the game. Interestingly, both this title and Sonic Dash are free to download and play, a vastly different business model for video game developers which used to rely heavily upon unit sales. In packaged software, Sega reported 2.4 million units sold and noted that global sales remain strong for its Total War series, which has sold more than 20 million units in 16 years. Overall sales for this division were almost 18 percent higher than in 2016’s first quarter.