Believe it or not, it’s rather hard to keep a secret in the video game space nowadays. After all, there are tons of people leaking things and reporting rumors, and claiming they have “inside sources” who know something that the vast majority of gamers don’t, and so on. Companies like Nintendo have had to go deep into their lockdown procedures to ensure that people don’t get information before they want them to have it. If you haven’t heard yet, Sega is dropping a special “movie content pack” for Sonic X Shadow Generations, which is in line with the upcoming movie starring the two. The highlight of this content is that Keanu Reeves will indeed be the voice of Shadow for it.
On the PlayStation Blog, producer Shun Nakamura revealed that the movie pack content wasn’t initially known fully to the dev team, as they thought it would be hard to “mesh the worlds” together:
“This title has been developed to satisfy not just the Sonic game fans, but also those who see the Sonic movie and become fans of Sonic and Shadow for the first time. But of course, we didn’t expect to have Shadow from the movie included in this game, as the world for the movie and game are different – we thought that it would be challenging to do so.”
However, Sega and Sonic Team saw an opportunity to make something special, so they took it and began working on this content last year.
The timing of the releases was also a key thing, as they hope for a bit of “back-and-forth” with gamers:
“Since the game and the movie pack content are releasing before the film, we thought it would be ideal to have people to play the game and have their feelings about Shadow, then go out and see the movie. After experiencing the film, hopefully they would want to come back to play the game again as Shadow.“
Nakamura noted that the Sonic X Shadow Generations team had limited knowledge of the movie and worked only with specific materials given to them by Paramount. Oh, and there was one other thing they didn’t know about…Keanu voicing Shadow in the bonus content:
“It was an incredibly secretive process, so when we started to implement the voice in the game, we actually weren’t told who this voice is. The voice recording was handled by Iizuka-san in the US, so when we received the recorded voice files, we listened to it and felt, is this that actor…?, so we were also surprised after the official announcement from Paramount! “
See? That’s how you keep a secret!
