Character Designs: Sonic The Hedgehog

Back in the mid-late 90s, I had a minor obsession with the Sega Saturn (I know, right?). Other than Daytona USA and Die Hard Arcade, all I ever really played on it was Sonic Jam. A compilation of the main four Sonic The Hedgehog games from the Mega Drive era. Basically a pre-gamecube era Sonic Mega Collection.

I do very much prefer Sonic Jam to Mega Collection, mainly for one reason. It fed my interests of the development of things I liked. In this case, the Sonic series. As we've already discovered, the game was pretty much my favoutite thing ever when I was a child. I just loved the spiky little blue rodent.
Sonic World was a small overworld for Sonic to explore (also I suppose Sonic's first proper 3D environment), with a lot of mini games to be found, but also buildings including the Music Shop (soundtracks), Movie Theatre (movies and ads), Hall of Fame (timeline) and Character House.

Character House would show some very interesting development artwork for the character designs. I used them as a reference to structure my own character designing back in the day. I used to do a shitload of face charts especially.

Here are a few from the gallery of Sonic and Dr. Robotnik:

Ah, a height chart! Something we all do, right?

Ah the many faces of Sonic. A lot of these not seen from post-Sonic Adventure Sonic. I wonder if the top right drawing is based on Felix The Cat?

How to draw Sonic. Yes, I did it.

Nose-tap.

A selection of poses. Love the third drawing. I think it was these designs where I discovered Sonic's shoes had buckles.

Perspectives!

Robotnik is quite big in comparison to Sonic.

I love how ridiculous his original design was. Back when he was just chasing down jewels and turning small animals into robots.

Unlike the heroes of this story, this guy had very good manners.

Robotnik love and Egg-Snow-Mobile. Whee!


What I'm guessing is a Sonic 2 era Egg Mobile. Good detail you never saw in the game itself. Oh god if only Sonic 4 was like this...