Sonic Team boss Takashi Iizuka has been doing the media rounds lately to further celebrate Sonic the Hedgehog’s 35th anniversary. Mr. Iizuka has participated in a new interview with One More Game during which he revealed that Shadow is now almost as popular as Sonic himself. That’s not all as the team had intended to kill Shadow off for good in the SEGA Dreamcast title Sonic Adventure 2, but because he turned out to be popular with the fans, they decide to revive him in the Sonic Heroes video game for the PlayStation 2.
“Now, the third movie is out, and the popularity of Shadow has been on the rise. Before that, the most popular characters were Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles, and it has always been that way. But now, Shadow has been rising up to the same popularity as Sonic. And me, personally… that’s my favorite character (Shadow). I want to have more places where Shadow can appeal more. I want to focus on him a little bit more.”
Shadow’s popularity has always surprised Sonic Team. In fact, he was originally meant to die permanently in Sonic Adventure 2. “If you have played Sonic Adventure 2, people may know that Shadow basically sort of died at the end of that game. We were originally intending to just kind of “die the character out” (kill him off), but the character Shadow was just so very popular that we decided to revive him in Sonic Heroes.“
Thanks to Sonic Galaxy 27 for sending in the news tip!
Pretty sure Shadow has been the 2nd most popular character for a while actually- they even acknowledge it in the Sonic Boom show in one episode. (say what you will about the Boom games, but the show was actually good, actually funny)
I think Shadow is a good character, his depiction in Boom notwithstanding.
shadow BEEN a top 2 lol
That doesn’t make sense. That would mean Big the Cat is the most popular Sonic character
I mean this isn’t really news, in fact Sonic Adventure 2 was one of the very last major titles developed by pre-3rd party SEGA, so they had to make it as if it’s final.
Now if only i could say the same for Sonic Team in 2010 where the final games were going to be a worse dumpster fire than 06 and Xtreme and a traditional title that isn’t hand developed by Sonic Team.
Rising to the popularity of Sonic? So about as popular as COVID?
The cope is strong in this one, guess he’s mad that Mario Movies didn’t rank as good 😊
🤣😂😓
• The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023): Grossed roughly $1.36 billion worldwide.
• Super Mario Galaxy Movie (2026): Surpassed $1 billion (pushing the Mario series past $2 billion total in just two films).
• Sonic the Hedgehog Franchise: The three films combined (Sonic 1 at ~$320M, Sonic 2 at ~$405M, and Sonic 3 at ~$474M–$492M) sit around $1.19 billion to $1.2 billion total.
It’s that puppet master dude, ignore him.
Nah that’s not me, they got the emojis the wrong way around lmaooo.
It’s “🫵😂” not “😂🫵”. A true professional ragebaiter wouldn’t mess that up, smh. The guy above is just a retárd.
Also Sonic is objectively garbage and you would never see me defending that trash in any shape or form. 🤣
I can agree.
The plan for Shadow being killed off and never coming back after Sonic Adventure 2 is a known fact in the fandom. Though I thought Shadow was always a popular character since his first appearance.
The best thing to do with shadow the hedgehog is to port all of his gamecube games to current gen platforms such as sonic adventure 2, sonic heroes, shadow the hedgehog and sonic riders. Also, sonic battle (gba) and sonic and sega all stars racing (2010 and 2012 editions) would be good.
This isn’t new information, especially the latter “news piece”. That has been common knowledge for decades now.
It would have been way more of an impact if he did die in SA2 and sega waited atleast a few games before bringing him back, instead of immediately for the next game.