 Why did Sega make The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog? An April Fool's Day observed offering that has taken the Sonic fandom by complete surprise, The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog has won the hearts of the vast majority of players. According to SteamDB, the game is currently one of the highest ranked games on Steam, nestled snugly between Baba Is You and Undertale. This makes it the highest ranked Sonic the Hedgehog game on Steam by a large margin. How then did this quirky Murder Mystery game come about? Why did Sega decide to kill off their mascot? And how did the game end up becoming one of the biggest hits of 2023? The game was the brainchild of Sonic's social media manager, Katie Kronowski. According to lead developer Greg Bathur, the idea initially came about during a conversation at the premiere for the first Sonic movie in 2020. It wasn't until 2022 though that Katie began discussing the game as a possibility in Ernest. She said of the development, The process for The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog was over a year long. I pitched a few ideas to the core group around late February or early March 2022. We then made an official internal pitch at the end of March with our Murder of Sonic direction and development started from there. Together we took a couple of months to iron out the story. At the same time, Greg began getting some of our game systems set up and we managed to get everything done and out in time for April Fool's 2023. A slide from an internal presentation that Katie has shown off on Twitter suggests that this was one of several options for games that the team were considering, but this was the first option pitched. What then was the appeal of Murdering Sonic? Said Katie, Much of it boiled down to, we think this is funny. We started with the idea of a typical Victorian murder mystery party and many of our themes and character roles spawned from there. We considered roles that made sense in similar stories and then tweaked them to match the vibe of our characters. Perhaps a few of them didn't get the roles that perfectly fit what they would have hoped for themselves, but we knew we could write around all those scenarios. Greg was an excellent choice of lead developer for the project, given his previous work on the similarly quirky visual novel Dream Daddy, a dating simulator all about fathers. Said Greg, Both games are games that have meme hooks. Dream Daddy is the gay dad game and Sonic gets murdered. Haha, they finally killed him. And you get into them because you heard this joke, but we kind of surprised with how genuine and meaningful all the interactions in the story are. There are things to learn and lessons in these stories. Starting with a meme-able game title was only the beginning though. Katie and her team had lengthy meetings, trying to pin down every detail of the story to make something that fit within Sonic's world while still being surprising and mysterious. Said Greg, We would have meetings together. Who killed Sonic? How did any of this happen? We knew that the headline was Sonic is Dead, but how did any of this happen? We knew it was a strong concept, just in terms of what is an effective social media move. This was a pretty good one, as long as it isn't something that makes people very upset. We really cared a lot going into this, and we knew we weren't going to make something stupid and inauthentic, like downplaying the importance of Sonic and his friends. We figured those good intentions, plus how much fun the headline would be, would get everyone on board. According to Katie, I shared our entire script with our lore team to make sure that even with the fun tone we were going with, we still made something that was Sonic to its core. Their feedback is always so invaluable, and we were able to sneak some of their great jokes and references in. Despite the game's relatively short runtime and simple visual novel design, the project involved a surprisingly large number of developers, many of whom were contributing to the game around other work assignments. Said Katie, we're lucky enough that Sega trusted us with this project, and it was a lot of extra work, as we still had to juggle all of our usual social, community, influencer responsibilities. Thus, while the game was made for marketing purposes, it also came from a sincere love of Sonic and his supporting cast. Katie and the rest of the team used the opportunity to sneak in a variety of references to their own favourite Sega games, characters, and even merchandise. While to explore all of these would involve dipping into spoilers, at one point a purple chow appears on screen. This chow is John. He was raised by Katie and her brother when they played Sonic Adventure 2 Battle as children. The game is littered with in-jokes and references for the team who developed it. Katie feels that this level of sincerity was crucial in making a game that didn't just get written off as a joke. She said, Coupled with the fact that we have a few team members who have shipped or are actively working on legitimate visual novel titles, helped make something that the visual novel community could be happy with. While we still wanted it to be humorous and make people laugh for the holiday, the team put so much love into the game that it wouldn't feel right to call it a joke. The game was only possible because a group of friends worked together on something that they were passionate about, even when doing so was difficult, time consuming, and didn't obviously bear fruit for their day jobs. The moral of the story then is that life is less predictable and a lot more fun when you share it with friends.