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Information in this article is about real-life people, companies, and objects, which do not relate to the in-universe Sonic series. |
Madeline Canepa Schroeder was the senior product manager and a marketer for Sonic the Hedgehog (1991) from SEGA of America. She also founded Crystal Dynamics in 1992.
History[]
Sonic the Hedgehog in production[]
Originally before the public release of the Sonic the Hedgehog series, Sonic Team envisioned the series going into an entirely different direction than what history has shown.
After Sonic the Hedgehog's design was conceived, the team began creating wildly, creative ideas for the character. Naoto Ohshima would think up a girlfriend for Sonic named Madonna, who was going to be head over heels for Sonic, having his own rock band, monsters with the same feet as the hero, the unnamed Doctor Eggman dressed up like a bee?, and Sonic's design was going to sport fangs and an unruly hairstyle with a little curl at the front.
As Sonic Team, with these concepts, were in the middle of thinking where to take the series as they were designing the game's mechanics to compete in the 1990's video game market, SEGA of America were in direct communications with the team at this time.
Evaluating the concept ideas for Sonic the Hedgehog[]
The character Madonna was originally planned to serve as Sonic's girlfriend.
Madeline Schroeder, SEGA of America's product manager of the time, thought that the character was too Japanese and wanted Sonic to be suitable in both America and Japan. She traveled overseas to discuss with SEGA of Japan over why the original concept of Sonic the Hedgehog (character) should be changed for an international audience.[2]
Reportedly, among her proposed changes were the removal of Madonna and Sonic’s rock band, as well as changing Sonic's quills and taking out the fangs. While well-intended, this would encourage further redesigning by SEGA of America to take it upon themselves to have Greg Martin redrawing Sonic's head to be more visually rounder, making his back spines stick out like a Mohawk, and make the cover of Sonic the Hedgehog (1991) for the West, much to SEGA of Japan and Yuji Naka's disapproval at the time.
The group Sonic the Hedgehog Band was originally planned to serve as Sonic's core team.
Madeline would say later in an interview that she never doubted Sonic, only she views herself more like a 'mother' to Sonic and states that "Mothers always care for their children". What she likely meant was she felt like 'protecting' Sonic as soon as she saw his design. Thus, she is very happy that she was able to "softened" Sonic's look prior to his public debut.
Madeline proudly calls herself the "Mother of Sonic."
Tenure as the blue hedgehog[]
One of Sonic's beta designs before Madeline made the quills to be less complicated.
To market Sonic the Hedgehog (1991), SEGA of America's Director of Marketing at the time, Al Nilsen, decided to do guerrilla marketing at a mall for tours to promote the game, where the public can get hands on experience playing Sonic the Hedgehog together with Mario games for their ad campaign, which would inadvertently introduced the world to 16-bit Mario.[2]
Voluntarily, Madeline Schroeder used to walk the mall tours and wore the SEGA mascot costume for the event. As she was walking the floor, she came by the gaming booths and saw a little boy playing Sonic the Hedgehog. She was incredibly shocked that she was standing right beside him in a big, blue, Sonic costume and she might as well have been invisible to him. Next to the kid was a teen and an adult, who both were also fixated in playing Sonic the Hedgehog.
Madeline is quoted saying,"Sonic was that famous!" upon reflection and said that she had never seen people playing with video games in such a way.
Trivia[]
- It's unknown how Madeline viewed Madonna's concept. Naoto Ohshima would later state some elements of Madonna's original concept were reused for Amy Rose, likely that of being enamored with Sonic.[3]
- Yuji Naka has claimed in a 1993 interview with Japanese magazine Beep! Mega Drive, the decision to remove her wasn't because of Madeline but because Madonna's intended concept shared too closely with Super Marios Bros.'s narrative, as Madonna was thought of as a kidnapped love interest for the hero.[4]
- Yuji Naka would state the removal of the Sonic the Hedgehog Band was due to hardware and time limitations[5] but they would never appear in the games. Sonic Team would later revisit the scrapped concept and made Vector the Crocodile into a playable character for the core continuity. They would reimagine him twice, with his current imagining as being the leader of a detective agency.
- While most of Madeline's proposed changes were stated by Yuji Naka to have been caused by other external reasons, her proposal for Sonic's softer quills and the removal of fangs appeared to have been accepted.
References[]
- ↑ Madeline Schroeder's Linkedin. Retrieved on 2 December 2022.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Sonic the Hedgehog GameTap Retrospective Pt. 2/4. GameTap (17 February 2009). Retrieved on 26 March 2023. "Madeline Schroeder: Originally, Sonic had fangs, and so we had to remove the fangs. We also had to remove his girlfriend Madonna and we also had to remove him out a rock band. I didn't doubt Sonic as a matter of fact I'm known as the mother of Sonic. Mothers love their children. I protected that character. I helped define that character. We had soften him a lot and um.. that was a... yeah there was war."
- ↑ レイ, 馬波 (24 June 2016). 『ソニック・ザ・ヘッジホッグ』誕生・ヒット・新生の真実をソニックチームのレジェンドクリエイターが、25周年のいま明かす 秘蔵資料満載の永久保存版！(2/5) (Japanese). Famitsu. Archived from the original on 1 October 2020. Retrieved on 1 October 2020.
- ↑ "The People Making Sega's Future". Beep! Mega Drive: 46–48. January 1993. Archived from the original on 29 December 2021.. "Questionnaire: To go back to the discussion of Tails, there aren’t any women in Sonic games. What about including a heroine? / Yuji Naka: There's a woman in the original source material. We created a woman named Madonna, and the original plan was to have Sonic rescue her. However, that kind of silly direction didn't really fit Sonic. We wanted to go with something more orthodox. Of course, there certainly are a lot of games like that in the world, where the hero has to rescue the princess. We wanted to do something different from Mario, though, and aim for a new direction."
- ↑ Sega's Yuji Naka Talks!. Heidi Kemps. GameSpy (30 September 2005). Retrieved on 1 May 2015. "Yuji Naka: But the biggest thing I remember we had that we didn't use in Sonic 1 was the break-dancing. We had this idea for the sound test. The composer for the game was one of the members of Dreams Come True, a famous Japanese band, so we wanted to do something special for the game's music. See, we wanted to have a separate sound-test screen with an animation of Sonic break-dancing while a "Sonic Band" played the game music. We were working on the images, and had enough space left on the cartridge memory for it, but once again time constraints prevented us from putting it in the program. So what should we do with that leftover space? I suddenly had an epiphany! It said to me ... "SE-GA!" It came from our TV commercials, and that became the game's startup sound. I thought it made a good impression when you heard it, right? Though to fit it in, we had to delete all the break-dancing picture data we had made up to that point. Oshima was heartbroken, since we didn't need his pictures anymore. But seriously, that sound alone took up 1/8 of the 4 megabit ROM! Ah, those were the days..."