Sega & Sonic All-Star Racing is out in stores this week and it’s packed full of Sega characters. Most of the characters are ones we haven’t seen in games in years now and while it’s great seeing characters from Jet Set Radio, Space Channel 5, Shenmue and more again after so long, it also kind of feels like a slap to the face. Here are some beloved Sega characters thrown into a racing title but there’s still no word on a sequel to some of these popular Sega IPs.
Talking to Dan Gallardo, Associate Product Marketing Manager at SEGA, he assured me that this wasn’t a dick move on Sega’s part. Sega included these characters to “reinvigorate [these] special characters with everybody.” New games for some of some of these IPs could very well be in the works and what better way to remind people about these characters than by putting them all together in a simple racing title.
About 15 Sega characters are in the game, some you know and some you might not recognize if you didn’t grow up in the early days of Sega. So why is someone like Shinobi not a playable racer over say Alex Kidd? Sega would have loved to “get every single [Sega] character in [Sega & Sonic All-Star Racing], but that’s just impossible to do unless we had a five year development time.” Sega went with “characters that are really popular right now and the ones that we want to show people that hey, this is a great catalogue of Sega characters.” Dan goes on to say “in an ideal world, we’d love to throw in Nights, Shinobi, and everybody else into the pot but unfortunately, some of them had to get left out.”
I asked Dan if we could possible see more characters down the line to which he replied “Who knows! It could be happening where later on down the road we throw them in their as DLC. “At the very least, Nights definitely needs to be a playable racer. Nights is actually in the game, but he’s only around in the very beginning of a race, waving the flag to signal the racers. If that’s not the ultimate tease, then I don’t know what is.
