Influenced in large by Sega's turbulent history as a company, the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise has had a startling frequency of troubled productions, most of which haven't ended well in the long run.
- Sonic the Hedgehog 2's history can be chronicled by the many alphas and betas made along the way, including a very early build given to Nick Arcade. The plot, which originally involved Time Travel, was rewritten. Many Zones were planned and scrapped, including the infamous Genocide City (later renamed to Cyber City before being scrapped) and the legendary Hidden Palace.note Sonic Team director Yuji Naka, dissatisfied with Sega of Japan's policies, flew with his team to the USA to make the game at Sega Technical Institute. Unfortunately, development there was marred by conflicting work ethics and language barriers between the Japanese Sonic Team and the American STI staff. The graphics and gameplay were constantly being tweaked even mere days before it was released, with many zones still bearing remnants of earlier layouts such as objects embedded in walls, and the manual itself including a screenshot of an earlier version of the game's title screen. Fortunately for everyone involved, the game went on to gain rave reviews and sell millions.
- An HD Fan Remake of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was cancelled in 2012 when the lead programmer, LOst, had Creative Differences with the rest of the team and provided a build of the game with DRM protection. Since he had not released the source code for the game's engine, the game could not be updated. Production restarted in 2014 when a fan of the project developed a replacement engine.
- Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic & Knuckles were split into two games, not only because the full game was becoming so large that the only cartridges it could possibly fit on were too expensive (for both the company and potential buyers alike), but also because of a licensing deal with McDonald's that pushed Happy Meal toys before the game was out, expecting a Christmas 1993 release. When that didn't happen, Sega released the first six stages of the game — as Sonic 3 —in February 1994 to keep their end of the deal. The rest of the game was released half a year later — as Sonic & Knuckles — in a special cartridge that could be hooked up to Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 for new play experiences. (The first game, however, isn't compatible because many of its graphics used Sonic's color palette and Knuckles's sprites interfering too much; Sonic 2 didn't have that problem thanks to Super Sonic.)
- Michael Jackson and some of his collaborators composed some music for it but Jackson went uncredited for reasons that remain unclear to this day. Some rumors claim he asked to go uncredited due to being unhappy with the Mega Drive's sound capabilities while others state that Sega chose not to credit Jackson after his 1993 sexual abuse allegations. Licensing issues may also be in play, as Jackson's touring keyboardist Brad Buxer had a previously unreleased track by his band The Jetzons
used for IceCap Zone. When the game was finally given a remaster for Sonic Origins, the music used by Jackson and Buxer was replaced with the original music created for the stages.
- Michael Jackson and some of his collaborators composed some music for it but Jackson went uncredited for reasons that remain unclear to this day. Some rumors claim he asked to go uncredited due to being unhappy with the Mega Drive's sound capabilities while others state that Sega chose not to credit Jackson after his 1993 sexual abuse allegations. Licensing issues may also be in play, as Jackson's touring keyboardist Brad Buxer had a previously unreleased track by his band The Jetzons
- Sonic X-treme stands as one of most notorious examples of troubled video game development—unlike most of the other examples here, the game never finished development. Many things went wrong with the development of what was supposed to be Sonic's Video Game 3D Leap on the Sega Saturn.
- Following the protracted development of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Sonic Team principals Yuji Naka and Naoto Ohshima refused point-blank to work on another Sonic game until they had been allowed to produce their passion project, NiGHTS into Dreams…, which Sega had little choice but to agree to. In the meantime, the company's management assigned Hirokazu Yasuhara and the rest of Sonic Team to work with Traveller's Tales on what would become Sonic 3D: Flickies' Island, reasoning that the Saturn would take a year or two to properly ramp up sales-wise, while the Genesis probably had enough life left in it to manage one more headline Sonic game. While not an incorrect assessment of the situation, it left no experienced Sonic developers to work on the first Saturn outing for the series, forcing them to fall back on Sega Technical Institute — and Sonic Team's dividing itself between too many projects (with the team also giving development support to Knuckles Chaotix, to boot) would prove to be a mistake the company would repeat many times in the future.
- What would eventually become Sonic X-treme for the Sega Saturn was actually the byproduct of a slew of several failed pitches for a Sonic game developed by Sega Technical Institute, which underwent many ideas for stories, game design, and even platforms (with the game previously planned for the Sega Genesis, and then its add-on the Sega 32X). Things did not get better when development for X-treme started, as the game's development staff was split between two teams, with lead designer Chris Senn leading development for the main/platforming levels, and lead programmer Ofer Alon leading development for the boss levels. Even with Mike Wallis monitoring both teams, the teams basically built two different games; which naturally led to led to some high tensions between both groups. (Not helped by smaller factions formed within the main teams to work on different aspects of the game note as well as Ofer's reclusion from the rest of his team). Then production delays kicked-in, thanks to a busted development process; the game was originally programmed on a Mac computer, quickly ported to PC and then to the Saturn. Thus the game had atrocious framerate issues on the Saturn, playing at a consistently sluggish 3 to 4 FPS.
- SEGA of America stepped in by hiring contract developer Point of View to smooth out development, but it didn't work out. They were first hired to assist in porting the game's engine to the Saturn, but ended up taking over development duties from Alon and failed at it — POV's programming demo was just a basic image of Sonic on a checkerboard background, and they still couldn't port Sonic X-treme's engine to the Saturn. POV's inexperience ultimately led to the breaking point in March 1996, when some Sega of Japan representatives-including then-President Hayao Nakayama-visited STI to check on the game's progress. While Alon and Senn formed a new group out of the main engine's original team to continue their own work following POV taking over production duties, and by the time of Nakayama and co's visit had succeeded in porting their engine to the Saturn before the visit; POV—without the original devs' knowledge—had already demo'd an older version of Alon's engine to the Japanese executives and utterly failed to win Nakayama's favor. Then Coffin's boss engine was shown in action, and Nakayama ordered the entire game redesigned around it to be completed for the holiday season. Senn's nerves prevented him from informing the Japanese execs that Alon was about to arrive with his newly polished engine, so they missed him.
- From then on, development was mostly restricted to Coffin's team to finish the game for the holidays; all other work on the main engine was effectively discarded. In desperation, Coffin's team asked for and was granted use of the engine used in NiGHTS into Dreams... to speed things up, only to then be told that they could no longer use the engine. Rumors abound as to why the team could not continue using the NiGHTS engine; the team speculated that Sonic Team director Yuji Naka found out that it was being used without his permission and threatened to quit Sega if it stayed that way, though Naka himself denounced this as slander and an attempt by the development team to save face for failing to complete the game, claiming that the NiGHTS engine would have been useless as it was coded in assembly language while X-treme was coded in C. Whatever the reason, STI was back to square one and the fiasco prompted Alon to leave Sega. Then Coffin and Senn did most of the work on their own, working 20 hours a day and sleeping in the offices until Coffin got pneumonia and Senn became so ill he was told he'd have six months to live if he kept going. With the game far from finished and two months left until the deadline, Wallis had no choice but to pull the plug on production, and a later attempt by Senn and Alon to get their work released on PC was rejected.
- Sonic X-treme's cancellation has been pointed out as a reason for the Sega Saturn's commercial failure; the hole left in its wake meant that the Sonic series wouldn't have a proper 3D platformer on the Saturn and the console wouldn't have a guaranteed Killer App. X-treme has been blamed for Sega Technical Institute's closure the year after, and Sonic wouldn't get an actual 3D entry until Sonic Team revamped the series for the Dreamcast.
- Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) had some major problems during development — although the game, unlike X-treme, was released, the final product was likewise far from finished. After Yuji Naka — one of the founding members of the Sonic franchise and a member of the Sonic Team Production Posse — resigned from Sega and consequently left ongoing development of the game, massive pressure was then put on director Shun Nakamura and the rest of the development team to have the game (which was supposed to help re-launch the franchise on what was a new generation of consoles) finished in time for that year's Christmas season as well as be released before year's end to qualify as the 15th anniversary title. And then if that wasn't enough, the development team was split so that a new team could work on a new Sonic game for the Wii console, the result of Sega discovering that a Wii version of the game (which was in development along with the PS3 and 360 versions) was unfeasible due to the Wii's technical limitations. The fact that they had to develop two remaining console versions of the game at the same time during the short development process did not help matters. The final product was ravaged by reviewers and fans alike as one of the worst video games ever and sold poorly, resulting in a black mark the series has still struggled to move on from.
- After the game came out to scathing critical reception and even worse sales, people were left absolutely flabbergasted as to what exactly happened behind-the-scenes with the Sonic Boom video game tie-in Rise of Lyric. Efforts from Sonic researchers managed to get in touch with an anonymous former member of the game's developer Big Red Button, who revealed the whole sordid story behind the game.
- The game started life as Project Apollo in 2011 (later given the working titles Sonic Origins and Sonic Synergy, the former of which would be reused as the official title of a Compilation Re-release). Heavily taking after Jak and Daxter (which members of the studio had previously worked on), the project initially started out as a standalone action-adventure game with heavy focuses on exploration, multiplayer co-op, and story (boasting an origin story about Sonic and Eggman with time-travel and ancient beings), with notably different character designs. As the studio spent two years developing a vertical slice demo for Sega, mandates by the publisher and chief studio Sonic Team kicked in, causing heavy changes to the original concept (among other things, speed was increased, exploration was downplayed, character designs were retooled to be closer to the main series, the origins backstory was axed entirely, and various game mechanics were scrapped).
- The game was originally developed for a digital release for Steam, with Xbox Live and PlayStation Store releases planned if sales were good (development kits for the PlayStation and Xbox platforms can be spied out in certain developer footage and screenshots for the game). This was undone by Sega pitching the game's vertical slice to publisher Nintendo, and ultimately folding the project into an exclusive partnership deal between the two parties; resulting in the game compromised into the game being Sega's third and final exclusive Sonic game for Nintendo's Wii U platform. This proved to be a major problem since the game ran on the CryEngine 3 game engine, which was not officially supported on the Wii U. note When the team starting porting the game to the Wii U in mid-2013, the results forced fundamental changes to the game—four-player co-op was restricted to two-player co-op, many game mechanics had to be reworked or removed, and levels were streamlined into a linear progression. A notorious quote from one of the game's developers was that the team "was fighting against the engine the entire time."
- During this time, a separate group of people pitched to Sega the idea of an animated Sonic TV series, which would eventually develop into the Sonic Boom sub-franchise. Despite BRB's game spending most of its development as an unrelated project, Sega later gave control over the game to the production team for the show a handful of months before the game's release, resulting in more changes being made to the game (particularly its story and Knuckles' personality, as well as requesting for characters, levels, and cutscenes to be added to the game) to bring it closer to the animated show. This chiefly explains why the final game and the animated show have only a handful of tenuous connections to each other.
- The bottom of the game's production eventually fell out when a large chunk of the team was found to have left in July 2014, either voluntarily or being let go; with the game reportedly going gold that same month. This revelation, alongside the previous Nintendo-exclusive Sonic games in the partnership selling poorly, has led to the common consensus that Sega rushed the game's development so they could release the game and quickly conclude the contract (as well as shove the game out in time for the Christmas season).
- In the long run, the final game that was released as Rise of Lyric had a whole murderer's row of glitches and design oversights, as well as unpolished graphics that left a lot to be desired — a stark contrast to early footage released for the game, which showcased impressive visuals. In a telling move, Sega enforced a review embargo to prevent official reviewers from telling the public about the mess the game was in, not that it did any good once the game was launched. The resulting fallout from the game's failure was BRB nearly going out of business (having only worked on AR/VR games since Rise of Lyric) and the game being partly responsible for Sega undergoing layoffs and restructuring the following year, followed by the publisher's CEO later apologizing for betraying consumers' trust in recent years.
