Former SEGA Producer Defends Sonic Boom – No, Really

SEGA Nerds recently featured former SEGA producer Stephen Frost on their Nerdcast.  Some of you might know Frost from the infamous Sonic Boom and its sprawling multimedia/merch-heavy campaign. If you want to hear one of the minds behind the biggest flop in gaming since Duke Nukem Forever defend his work to the death, glad you’re here.

Frost calls Sonic Boom “a huge success.”  This doesn’t have so much to do with Rise of Lyric or Shattered Crystal or any other Sonic games, but with the relative success of the TV show and the Tomy toy line. The goal of Sonic Boom was to reach a larger audience, to “make Sonic relevant again.” The Sonic Boom TV series is helping to “expand [Sonic’s] audience” in the US.  

With some pretty nifty sequential collect-em-all covers, I’ll admit.

And, according to Frost, early shipments of the Tomy line were selling out within twenty-four hours.  Fine and dandy, props given where props are earned. But when he’s finally out of Sonic Boom products to name-drop, Frost has to talk about the actual game.

“We overextended our grasp in some ways.”

Yeah, you could say that.  But hey, better a spectacular failure than a benign success, right?

“If there’s any lesson that I’ll take forward with me, it’s that being too ambitious can be bad.”

Holy crap.  Great thing to tell the kids, Frost.

The Frost interview clocks in over two hours.  If you just want to hear the Sonic Boom stuff, jump to 1:42:00.  Or you can read the transcript of the Sonic Boom portion here.