Throughout Sonic's 15 year history, many characters have been introduced to his universe - Knuckles, Tails, Amy to name a few. This year, the Sonic team introduces Silver the Hedgehog for the new next generation title.

Before the Sonic The Hedgehog team was formed, our development team was considering creating a new game (other than a Sonic game) set in a very realistic world, using the physics engine. However, when we were assigned to start concepting for the new Sonic game for next generation platforms, we decided to combine these ideas together. We implemented the realistic features and the physics engine ideas and brought them to these game systems, within the Sonic franchise. While the use of the physics engine gives a lot of depth to the game experience, from the varied gameplay, to the extreme detail implemented in objects and backgrounds, it also allowed us to design huge worlds, featuring multiple paths within each level for players to explore. This new opportunity to provide differing paths compliments the idea of different playable characters with very unique abilities and attributes. For instance, we designed the new character of Silver the hedgehog to have telekinetic powers, which offers a very different gameplay style compared to Sonic's super speed. It gives countless ways to clear the game, and players will be able to enjoy the game in their own way, via different situations. This is what makes this title even more exciting. Silver as a character was created at that point, but it came from the question of what would be possible by incorporating a physics engine within a Sonic game.

Silver's futuristic features and the mystical capabilities, such as his ability to control objects using his ESP, was one thing we wanted to implement in Silver's design. We wanted to incorporate features of Sonic with new attributes that no other Sonic characters has.

Until we came up with the current Silver design, starting with the spines on the head to the design of his shoes...we came up with more than 50 different concepts. When the team first started this project, and we had no idea what direction we should follow for this new character, someone came up with the idea of a character with Sonic's scarf like hair, but in more volume. From this idea, we pursued the idea of a mink as a new character, which ended up being the prototype of the design we see today. So, the character Silver originally started off as a mink rather than a hedgehog.

But, the team was very concerned whether a mink would blend with the other characters in the Sonic universe. This is something the team really took time in their discussion, before finalizing Silver as a hedgehog. From there, the hardest thing for us to decide was the color of the body. We started off exploring orange as a color, but ultimately the process led us to white-gray. This color came up when we had to assign the character models, to fully use the next generation technology of shading. Since we did not want it to be just simple white-gray, we focused on the texture and ended up with the color we see today. And that is also where we got the character name, Silver!

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