According to Sonic Team head Takashi Iizuka, SEGA had aspirations of beating Disney with Sonic the Hedgehog back in the day.

Iizuka was reflecting on the passion inside the company at the time in a recent interview. The goal of surpassing Disney is one of the things that motivated the team working on Sonic the Hedgehog many years ago.

Iizuka said in an interview with Crunchyroll: 

“You know, back when they were making Sonic originally on the Genesis, the passion inside of the team, and what really kind of drove people to go out there and really make Sonic this amazing thing was… they wanted to beat Disney.

… (laughs) They wanted to have content that was gonna be far above and beyond what Disney was doing. And this is, you know, back in the early ’90s. That was the passion that they had when they were making Sonic and bringing Sonic to market.

I think that’s gonna still kind of carry over. Disney is amazing. They are still up there, and that’s probably the goal that we’re going to keep aspiring to. They are far, far away, right? 10 years from now, it’s like, that’s still what we want. We want to take out number one, because they are so good and so up there.

That’s what we want to aspire to.”

Iizuka’s comments remind us of some marks made by Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto back in 2023. In an interview, he said he was “very honored to be compared with Disney”. Miyamoto also brought up “the fact that Nintendo is then being compared to Disney really gives me the [confidence] that we’ve gotten to a point where we can bring Nintendo to the concept of reassurance and perhaps [give that] reassurance.” You can read all of his comments here.

For more on Sonic, you can read some comments from SEGA’s president here. He spoke about the importance of the IP, but also pointed out that the company failed to reach its goal and had higher hopes of the latest game selling more.