Shadow The Hedgehog (video Game) - Development

Development

"Shadow the Hedgehog has a much darker personality than Sonic the Hedgehog. In Sonic the Hedgehog, your typical mission was to go out and beat the bad guys, but in Shadow the Hedgehog, it gives the players a choice to either take the side of the good hero guys or to take the side of the bad buys, giving the player the option to choose in the game."

—Sonic Team's Takashi Iizuka

Shadow the Hedgehog was developed by Sega Studio USA, the now-defunct United States division of Sega's Sonic Team, and published by Sega. Sega first revealed the game and its tagline ("Hero or villain? You decide.") at the March 8, 2005 inauguration of Sonic the Hedgehog into the Walk of Game. Sega formally announced development of the game for the Nintendo GameCube, PlayStation 2, and Xbox video game consoles on March 23, 2005. The same year, Sega released the game in North America on November 15, in Europe on November 18, and in Japan on December 15.

Sonic Team's Takashi Iizuka, who had worked on the Sonic the Hedgehog series since 1993, targeted a younger audience with previous Sonic games and wanted to target an older audience with Shadow the Hedgehog. The game's development team wanted to make a game featuring Shadow to resolve plot mysteries that began with the character's introduction in Sonic Adventure 2. The team felt that Shadow's design—inspired by films such as Underworld, Constantine, and the Terminator series—would make the story darker and allow for elements, such as vehicles and weapons, otherwise considered inappropriate for a Sonic game. Sonic Team's Yuji Naka stated in an interview with GameSpy that he wanted to use Shadow as the game's main character due to his popularity among fans and being the best fit for a "gun action" game. The game contains profanities, including instances of damn, bastard, and hell spoken by Shadow and other characters such as Espio, the G.U.N. Commander, Knuckles, and Sonic. Profanity and the use of guns, both firsts for the Sonic series, generated some pre-release controversy. The ESRB assigned the game a rating of E10+ for "fantasy violence" and "mild language."

The game is the first in the series to use the 4Kids cast from Sonic X following the death of Doctor Eggman's previous voice actor, Deem Bristow. This cast continued to be used until late 2010 when all cast members except Mike Pollock were replaced before the release of Sonic Free Riders.

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