Yakuza producer Daisuke Sato would like to make a Sonic game

Daisuke Sato has worked for SEGA since 1994, and has been credited on a lot of games in that time. He's best-known as series producer for the Yakuza games for RGG Studio, and was the director of Yakuza 3. He's also got credits on Virtua Fighter, Super Monkey Ball, F-Zero, and Streets of Rage games, as well as directing Binary Domain, but when he was interviewed as part of SEGA's 60th anniversary celebration, he mentioned one series he hasn't worked on before: Sonic the Hedgehog.

"In the sense that I want to try it," he said,  "… well, Sonic. After all, when you hear SEGA you think Sonic. I'd like to get involved once at least. But for me, the so-called Sonic is, well, if I were to do it, I wouldn't do Sonic as it was. I would like to make a completely different Sonic."

With the notable exception of Sonic Mania in 2017, the blue mascot hasn't had a great time in recent years. Maybe it's time to reimagine him in a suit, performing karaoke and managing a hostess club in between cracking heads on the mean streets of the Studiopolis Zone.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

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.

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