In a recent interview conducted by Sonic Stadium, the head of Sonic Team, Takashi Iizuka, built upon his statement two years ago by offering fans of the IDW comics a possible pathway to seeing their favorite characters from the comics in game format. Some of these characters, such as Tangle the Lemur and Surge the Tenrec, are already playable in the mobile game Sonic Dash, but to see them in a mainline game (beyond having their names mentioned like in Sonic Frontiers) would be a great victory for the most devoted of their fans.
The Sonic The Hedgehog series has a seemingly endless amount of characters in it, yet few get the same amount of screentime as its namesake, and even fewer get treated with the same respect. But Sonic Team and SEGA have, in recent years, tried to shift away from nepotism and towards embracing the series’ diversity. Sonic Mania brought back Ray the Flying Squirrel and Mighty the Armadillo, both of whom had been lost to time, and Sonic Frontiers, as previously mentioned, made it a habit of referencing more obscure characters in order to honor their contributions to Sonic’s history, as well as to possibly generate intrigue for their return.