An Exploration Of Sonic Galleries & Artbooks

When people talk about video games, there’s one aspect that will always go unnoticed that’s been becoming less and less relevant to the discussion of a game’s development, or in many cases, taken for granted, and that is concept art. Concept art is the work created to help design, develop and finalize locations, props, visual styles and characters for developers to use in the process of game development. Something as small as a plant will go through many variations, and after 10 ideas are sketched out and designed, only one will be further developed.

It's easy to take for granted the talent and effort put into a game’s identity, especially when the work is never exposed to outside eyes. However, in some cases, that work does get the spotlight it deserves, and in turn, can inspire a player to pick up a pencil or stylus, and design their own worlds. That’s the topic of today’s blog, because we’ll be going over the galleries and artbooks featured in several titles across the Sonic series, an IP notable for colourful worlds, creative characters, and style range.

Our story begins in 1997, with the release of Sonic Jam. Jam was a game collection for the SEGA Saturn focusing on Sonic’s history and mainline titles up till that point. With 4 titles available, a Adventure prototype disguised as a hub world and a wealth of bonus features, it would set the standard for game collections going forward, and this game was the first Sonic title to include several galleries.

This first gallery included three categories, Sonic, Sonic & Miles and Sonic & Friends. The gallery mainly focused on the SEGA Harmony artwork, which was featured on the covers of a internal SEGA Japan magazine. The art features Sonic and friends in beautiful illustrations depicting them in several scenarios, like Sonic being late for work or waiting for the bus, Tails watching Sonic through his window on Christmas, or the gang playing a song at a concert. The second gallery was the Character House, which included illustrations and design documents of Sonic and friends, ranging from clean, coloured illustrations, or line art drawings highlighting the characters abilities or facial expressions.

Sonic Jam’s galleries focused more on clean designs with not much rough work, and kept to characters rather than a wide view of other elements, like stages or assets. It’d take a few more titles till we reach that level of detail, but for now, let’s jump into the next gallery, as in 2002, one year after SEGA dropped out of the console market, that year would see the release of what is the most famous and popular Sonic collection Sonic Mega Collection.

Sonic Mega Collection released in 2002 for the Nintendo GameCube, and a enhanced port called Sonic Mega Collection Plus would release in 2004 for Xbox, PS2 and PC. Following in the footsteps of Sonic Jam, majority of the artwork in the gallery features illustrations of the original designs of the Sonic cast, but also the final designs of the cast in the modern style. Package designs for the recent games were also featured, but the standout addition was the Sonic Comic pages. Not only were the covers of the Archie comics included, but several pages of some comics too. The gallery also included some special illustrations and movies, including a in development version of the Sonic Heroes intro, including story boards! However, that’s as deep as the gallery went in Mega Collection, and the same can be said for Gems Collection. Gems Collection’s gallery focuses more on Sonic CD and the SEGA Saturn era of artwork, as that era and titles were missing from Mega Collection. Beyond these additions were in-game screenshots of Sonic Adventure, Sonic Adventure 2, and the CGI cutscenes of Sonic Heroes. However, the inclusions were improving somewhat, as concept sketches from Sonic 1 were being included, but the total was only 4 pieces, which especially since this was released a year or two before the 15th anniversary of the series, it’s super disappointing.

However, starting in 2007, we’d receive 3 titles back to back that showed a major improvement for in-game galleries, and this trend starts with Sonic & The Secret Rings.

Sonic & The Secret Rings is the first title in the series to include it’s own dedicated concept art gallery, being unlocked through challenges within the game. The book covers designs for main characters, concepts for the enemies, and environment illustrations from locations across the entire game, with each category in their own chapters, including titles and descriptions for each piece of art. The following game, Sonic Unleashed, also included an art gallery, found with Professor Pickles office. 

This included 71 pages of artwork, from NPC design documents, including height comparisons, sketches, to the rough linework of buildings and assets. The last game of the three is Sonic & The Black Knight. Black Knight follows the structure of Secret Rings in the menu design, and features the same types of concept designs, however due to the focus on weapons in the game, we get to see weapon designs for Sonic and the knights of the roundtable, but this is, again, a bit of a downgrade from both Secret Rings and Unleashed, as there is only a handful of pages to see, which is very disappointing.

We reach 2011, the 20th Anniversary of the series, and we arrive at the game that wanted me to make this video, Sonic Generations. This is going to take a more personal route but It’s important I give context. Sonic Generations was the first 3D Sonic game I ever played, and the second Sonic game I ever played, just after Sonic 2, so I was quickly starting to attach to the series as a young age. Throughout the game, you can collect red rings and music notes from either exploring the levels or completing challenge acts, and you’ll collect either two items, being music to play throughout stages or artwork. Running to the far LEFT of white space, you’ll find the Collection room, which features a jukebox to listen to music from across the series, bios for various characters, and even a secret statue room. But the focus is the art gallery, and man…what an impression this left on me as a kid. 

The structure of the artwork is interesting, as while it does include artwork made for Generations, it’s limited to a few zones. Green Hill, Chemical Plant, Sky Sanctuary and Speed Highway pieces of art are the concepts made for Generations, with some concepts featuring the game model placed in to save time, showing the rough reality of concept art in general, but beyond Speed Highway, we get the original concept art for the respective zones, which while I would be normally disappointed, it’s awesome we get to fill in the gaps of titles that never had concept artwork be shown off before, like Seaside Hill from Sonic Heroes. The selection here too is amazing, as not only do we get rendered illustrations of levels, but we get not just line art, sketches, rough colour designs, objects and their possible various designs, but even exploration of ideas for said assets. For example, the buildings in Crisis City are fully developed, showing off the possible positions they can be placed in to serve the level design, the landmarks that can be made from said assets, but the smallest details like the damage of the buildings. This is further explored in Plant Wisp’s pages, with pages dedicated to the development of the flowers and vegetation that will populate the environment, and acts as reference for 3D modelers. Because of this level of detail put into the gallery, it inspired me to become a concept artist, with a focus on environmental and asset design.

After Generations released, the Sonic series would begin to change the direction of how any concept art would be distributed.  On 6th December 2013, SEGA would post concept art of the giant Caterkiller, which would set a trend of social media posts being the place to see concept art, which while very cool and helped fill out the dead space between major news, felt it was taking away the significance of artwork as a reward for players who put the time and energy to explore and master these games. This trend lasted up till the release of Team Sonic Racing, with this type of presentation being the only type of presentation till Feb 2019. 

During this time however, SEGA partnered up with Cook & Baker to release the first official Sonic Art Book, including concept art between the years 1991 – 2016 in time for the 25th anniversary of the series. This book later got reprinted including artwork from future releases for the 30th anniversary which is the version I’ve got. Not only Is it a quality product with wonderful presentation, but it also was a tease at what the future of dedicated Sonic art galleries would look like. In 2017, Sonic Forces released, and like Lost World, didn’t include any gallery in-game, having the same approach of uploading artwork to their social media pages, however, if you bought the physical edition, you got something…interesting. Sonic Forces, unlike Sonic Mania, never got a collectors edition but a “Bonus Edition”, now depending where you got your copy, you would get one of two physical items and DLC codes for Avatar skins. The first item was a controller skin, and the second was 4 “art cards”. These art cards include 4 pieces of art featuring two pieces of key art, with the first including the playable characters and Tails/Knuckles, and the second being key art featuring Dr. Eggman, Metal Sonic and Infinite, and the other two being concept art for Green Hill and Arsenal Pyramid.

This idea of including concept art as bonus items in physical releases would continue the next year with the release of Sonic Mania Plus, which saw Mania get a physical release for the first time, and along side the bonuses of the physical copy, it came with a mini artbook! Consisting of 32 pages, it ranges from classic styled doodles showcasing level gimmicks, sketches of characters, coloured illustrations of levels, character sheets for animations, and even the early logo designs! White I’m sure it could have been much longer, I do appreciate it being here in the first place, and especially being a physical item, it fills the spot of reading a old game manual, but this time to dazzle you in different levels of developed designs. This trend would continue with the re-release of Team Sonic Racing, being reprinted in time for the 30th anniversary of the Sonic series. 

This included a 30th anniversary artbook, being 34 pages, focusing on showcasing character designs, sprites, logos and more across the series. While a dedicated artbook for TSR would have been more suited, it’s still cool to see this. Now, this wouldn’t be the last time we’d see a physical artbook for Sonic, as for the 30th Anniversary saw the release of Sonic Colours Ultimate. 

While Sonic Colours Ultimate didn’t get it’s own artbook, It did get one focusing on the characters lives in Sonic’s world. Titled Sonic The Hedgehog – Life In Sonic’s World, this book was an item included in the Japan exclusive Sonic Colours Ultimate 30th Anniversary Package, which also included a CD with each track corresponding to a certain illustration. There isn’t any concept art in the book, instead including Sonic Pict art featured on the Sonic Japan Twitter account.

In 2022, two games were released, starting with Sonic Origins, and for the first time since 2011, we have a in-game art gallery. This art gallery focuses on the Mega Drive era Sonic games, with pages being unlocked from coins you’ve collected throughout the game. The contents include packaging, manuals from each region, character bios, the SEGA Harmony illustrations, IDW Classic Sonic comic covers, album covers, design documents for classic sonic animations, and a lot of concept art. What I love about the Origins gallery is how much it goes deep, with this gallery including some never-before seen pieces. The gallery also includes videos for the cutscenes in the game, Mania adventures, the animatics, and even the Sonic 30th Symphony performances for the classic games. This gallery focuses on a specific era, and manages to really grab a lot more than you usually see, avoiding some of the issues of most galleries. 

We also got best of both worlds, as when Origins Plus released, Origins got a physical edition and a 34 page art book, meaning we got a digital and physical options for art to be shown off. 2022 also saw the release of the latest 3D Sonic game developed by Sonic Team, Sonic Frontiers. Now, you may think that SEGA would provide the same service they did like with Origins, with a unlockable gallery in-game and a physical mini-art book, however, not this time, as this would be the first Sonic title to introduce the newest business model. 

Sonic Frontiers did have a physical artbook, however it was only available for Japanese players as apart of the Frontiers Limited Edition. Well, I’m sure SEGA decided to provide western fans with an artbook? Or an in-game art gallery? 

No, instead we got…a digital artbook. If you buy the digital deluxe version of Sonic Frontiers, one of the bonuses you get is a extra application featuring the artbook content of the physical book and a mini soundtrack. Now for the contents of the book, it’s very good, as it features a nice variety of work, and even does more of the Generations inclusions as we get dedicated pages to several assets that most people wouldn’t bat an eye too, showing the level of work the art team had to put in to really flesh out the design of the world. We also get some beautiful illustrations of the Starfall Islands and Cyberspace, and what’s awesome about this is we get to see early ideas for what would have been featured in these locations, like the construction of Giganto on Chaos or the spiralling corkscrews of Ares. Now, what I will say is that comparing this to a physical book or a in-game gallery, this is a very weak attempt to share what is the foundations of the game, that aspect of development is so important and deserves to be preserved or as a reward for players, not an excuse to raise the price, now, would I rather have this than nothing? Well, of course I’d want this, but we know SEGA can do more than this. Another aspect is the presentation, something I’ve purposely neglected to mention until now. Presentation is a very neglected aspect of most games, but if you put effort into it, it’ll leave an impression. In Sonic Jam, there was Sonic World, which saw Sonic go 3D in a traditional gameplay style in a time where Sonic never had a true 3D platformer game, and a year before Sonic Adventure, that fact made Sonic World really special for a lot of Saturn players, and made the overall experience of the gallery be more of a retrospective experience, especially since the Dreamcast was around the corner.

Sonic Mega Collection and Gems Collection never had a 3D hub, but it made up for it with a stylish menu design, with geometric shapes dancing across the screen, with wonderful music playing in the background. The Sonic Storybook games leaned into the book aspect, with categories of art being labelled as chapters, and Generations…man…

Generations featured a classy red room with a remix of Door To Summer playing, which was a track from Knuckles Chaotix, the only Sonic game released on the Mega 32X. Origins was more standard, but the jukebox allows you to create playlists with not only the original music from the Mega Drive era, but the remixes from newer Sonic games, and they can be played along side the gallery, which is very nice. Then you have the digital artbook of today, and it’s very plain, with the only sound you’ll hear is the UI sound effects. This continues to be a issue with the next game, as Sonic Superstars also got a digital artbook, and the same can be said for this too, very happy with the art included, but the presentation lessens the flair and wonder of it.

We then fast forward to today. Almost 13 years since it’s release, Sonic Generations is returning with a brand new remaster and a new campaign with Shadow Generations. Now, despite Sonic Generations including a in-game gallery, the digital deluxe version of the game is also coming with a digital artbook, just like Sonic Frontiers and Superstars, now, this initially made me worry, as I didn’t want the Shadow portion to not have the same treatment as Sonic’s gallery. It’d be a glaring omission, and would come off as very scummy, however, with the gameplay footage we’ve seen, there are collectables within the levels, including journal pages, which might mean the physical exclusive booklet might be available in-game, but also music notes, meaning we’ll unlockable tracks to play throughout the stages. But the biggest highlight for me was the paintbrush collectable, and I hope this doesn’t age poorly, as I think it confirms that Shadow will also have his own gallery.

Now, you might be asking why I care so much, why do galleries and artbooks matter this much to me, and I illuded to it before. Sonic Generations’ gallery stuck out to me in a time where I was figuring out what career path I wanted to take as a kid. I began wanting to be a astronaut, as I was very attached to Space and the concepts that came with it, however I realized that was a very unlikely path I’d make, so I downgraded to a scientist, came to the same conclusion, and became stumped on what I could do. But after seeing the artwork in Generations, I became inspired to take up art, which is what I did. When I reached year 11 in high school I picked Art & Design for my GCSE and after a year, I managed to get a pass with a level 4 GCSE. After I moved onto college in 2018 I did graphic design since I wanted to spread out my horizons just In case, and managed to get a Merit for it, which is the equivalent to a B. Fast forward to today, 2024, and I've just got my grades for University doing Game Art and I got a 2:1, a really good grade. I managed to achieve that because of a gallery feature in a game from 2011. 

I've always felt stuff like galleries and artbooks are super important to include because It really can leave an impression onto someone, and hell, can shape their career path in life. Not only does it make a really cool collectable for players to hunt for, but could inspire people to pick up art equipment and start sketching.