New Sonic game announcement 'a bit premature' says Sonic Team head

May's Sonic the Hedgehog livestream ended with a teaser for a new game from Sonic Team coming in 2022. It had a forest and some kind of digital effect when Sonic ran real fast and not much else to show.

In an interview with 4Gamer translated by Nintendo Enthusiast, Sonic Team head Takashi Iizuka has admitted the announcement was made a little bit early. "We haven't announced a brand new action game for the Sonic series since Sonic Forces," he said, referring to the disappointing 2017 game, "and that caused fans to worry. While it was a bit premature, I wanted to at least take the occasion of the 30th anniversary to announce that a brand new title was in development."

When asked about the mysterious shape that Sonic traces when seen from above at the end of the teaser, Iizuka said, "It is something symbolic that appears in the game, but the meaning is still a secret. However, I will say that it's not something one would figure out through deduction. we'll eventually share more details, so please wait a little longer."

So don't expect to hear anything more about the next Sonic game for a while. According to rumors, the working title is Sonic Rangers and it's an open-world game with Ubisoft-style tower-climbing, an xp system, and a skill tree.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.