The Sonic Stadium has uncovered a large amount of concept artwork for popular racing titles Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing and Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed. Some of the art is from the very early stages of development, right to the initial pitch itself in Transformed’s case. We have even found the Gilius Thunderhead on Chicken Leg concept Sumo Digital’s Steve Lycett spoke of in a developer diary entry.
Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing
Artist Sam Neale has released some early concept pieces of Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing, including art of Gilius Thunderhead from Golden Axe who was once planned to be in the game. Also revealed is that the game used to be called SEGA Superstars Racer.
– Sega Superstars Racer concepts, to design racing vehicles to suit the characteristics of each Sega character.
– This was a quick 2nd concept visualisation stage.
– Characters included: Alex Kidd, Eggman, Gilius and Monkey Ball.
– All modelled very basically and quickly in Max with simple max material shaders.
Doctor Eggman’s vehicle went through a few changes during development.
Dr. Eggman’s Kart made for ingame demo . I have also added the game textures: Diffuse, Ambient Occlusion, Specular and Normal map. Renders in VRAY, textures created from Max and Photoshop.
Gilius Thunderhead’s and Alex Kidd’s vehicles closely resembled their rides in their classic games at this early stage.
Sega Racing concepts for Golden Axe “Gilius” & “Alex Kidd”. A blend of 2D images and 3D renderings for 1st idea phase. The 3D images used a three colour cell shader, combined with an Ink & Paint shader, to give a unique art style.
Like Doctor Eggman, AiAi’s vehicle also went through a lot of changes. Early designs show him in his ball as standard.
Sega Racing concept sketches through design development phase, from pencil sketches through to final in game kart model used for demo. Ideas for MonkeyBall and Eggman Racers.
Surface3D were hired to help out Sumo Digital with the user interface and promotional renders for Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing. The above images released show early concepts of the UI with very different icons to the final game and re-used placeholder artwork for the characters.
Speaking of characters, it appears that the roster may have once featured a lot more Sonic characters. On the character selection screen we can see Blaze, Silver, Rouge (or Rogue as she’s been named here), Vector and Espio. Also noteworthy is that the tracks had different names earlier in development.
The following description was also released:
Sonic All Stars Racing • User interface design and promotional renders
Project InfoClient: Sega / Sumo Digital
Platform: XBox 360 and PS3This game was Sega’s answer to Mario Kart, taking the game in a slightly different direction, Sega joined forces with Sumo to build a Sonic and other famous Sega characters into this driving game.
Initially tasked with helping Sumo develop the User Interface, we had to work within strict constraints of what their engine could do.
After creating some diverse interface designs, Sumo narrowed this down and we got to work on the asset creation for the UI.
Additional support was provided by rendering out characters for the promotional material, we posed and rendered Ryo on his motorbike. The final box art also needed some composition and character work to finish it off.
Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed
Artist Richard Tawny has released some early concepts for Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing‘s sequel Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, including an impressive piece of jungle artwork made for the initial pitch to SEGA showing the sea and air idea. Billy Hatcher, who didn’t make it into the final game, can be seen flying behind Sonic.
Tawny also shared this description:
// SEGA Allstars Racing Transformed //
SEGA Europe Ltd.
Here is an early concept of an all-star racing game with flying cars.
I am working closely with SUMO Digital in their up-coming racing game; With the help of Scott Robertson (Design Studio Press), I developed Sonic’s Car, Plane and Boat design to feel like a true speedster capable of racing in any world, real or otherwise!
The car was developed in Modo and was iterated many times between myself, the Producers at SEGA Europe and Sonic Team in Japan.
Alex Suermondt has shared some vector images of artwork made for Sonic & All-Star Racing Transformed‘s boxart and promotional materials.
Suermondt also gave a description of the project:
Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed –
Vector Illustration
Project completed over 2-3 days
I was commissioned by Sega to produce a series of vector illustrations for Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed.These were vector iterations of the game’s main vehicles to be easily scaled for a variety of purposes. This was based upon the vehicle shots for the pack artwork and another set was produced after being carefully refined to allow the print to be carried out with only a few colours.
Sources: Alex Suermondt’s portfolio, Richard Tawn’s portfolio, Surface3D and Sam Neale’s portfolio (Link 1, Link 2)