Character artwork for Sonic the Hedgehog and Tails have been found buried within the official website for SEGA’s Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania, suggesting that the two furry heroes are planned to be (as-yet-unannounced) playable characters in the game.
At present, the official website hosts a small number of information pages about the game, including a Character page that only shows heroes from the tilt-n-tumble series’ past – such as AiAi, MeeMee and GonGon. One keen-eyed fan realised that, through looking at the character artwork filenames and sheer guesswork, hidden art files named ‘sonic.png’ and ‘tails.png‘ are also included on the server.
It seems like Sonic and Tails will be playable characters! Whether they will each have any special abilities during gameplay or not remains to be seen – we can’t wait until they are formally announced by SEGA.
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania was recently announced this past E3, and had a big showing at Nintendo’s E3 Direct earlier today. It is an anniversary package containing the biggest hits from the original Super Monkey Ball games of the early 2000s. That’s reason enough to get excited about it, but with Sonic and Tails in tow, it just got a whole lot more interesting!
Thanks so much to ‘sonicyay2’ for the discovery and news tip!
My blood sacrifice upon the retail altar of Banana Blitz has been rewarded with the games I -actually- wanted! And now I can be Tails!
Specifically Classic Sonic and Tails. I know there’s no sign of Modern, but I just thought it was worth pointing out.
Classic Sonic seems to fit better with the aesthetics of the Monkey Ball cast.
Sonic and Tails are not cannon to the monkey ball franchise…
Sonic exists in all universes. He may take many forms, but his presence is always there. In some places, he’s a man in a suit at the Olympics. In others, he’s a doctor dressed in a suit performing hilarious medical procedures.
@Mikey: Nobody said that they were?