Sonic Pulls Another Super Mario, Lands First Major 'action RPG' Gig

After inviting Mario and company to an Olympics-themed party for later this year in the run-up to the festivities in Beijing soon after, who would have thought that Sonic would do something else that Nintendo's famous plumber is known for participating in?

Yet even still, we certainly weren't expecting this so quickly: it appears that the iconic hedgehog has landed a gig similar to that of the plumber's own Paper Mario series. According to IGN, In a totally unexpected surprise announcement released on Thursday, UK developer BioWare (of Jade Empire fame) announced an exclusive deal with Sega to produce an RPG project set in the Sonic the Hedgehog universe for Nintendo's DS handheld.

Set to release sometime in 2008, the as-yet-unnamed RPG project is being directed by the same UK development studio responsible for games such as Baulder's Gate and Knights of the Old Republic. "BioWare is one of the hottest names in RPG development in the world," reports Sega America president and COO Simon Jeffery. "Everyone at Sega has huge confidence that Sonic is in the safest of hands," he added, "and that BioWare can [masterfully] create the ultimate handheld RPG experience for gamers of all ages."

BioWare president Greg Zeschuk added that "We're thrilled to be working with Sega on [the] Sonic [RPG project, owing to the fact that the character is] one of the industry's most enduring and compelling icons [ever.]" Additionally, BioWare CEO Ray Muzky had this to say about his faith in the project: "As huge fans of [the entire] Sonic [series] ourselves, we're [very extremely and unequovocally] committed to delivering a truly amazing story-driven experience within the Sonic universe, focusing on capturing the character's broad [industry-wide] appeal... [while] placing him in a completely original adventure.

This, of course, is not the first time a mascot-caliber videogame character's franchise got the action-RPG treatment. In the mid-1990s, Nintendo and Squaresoft (the former half of what today is Square Enix) partnered to bring the action-RPG treatment to the former company's Super Mario francise with the first Super Mario RPG title Legend of the Seven Stars on the Super NES platform. However, after the two companies split over the further development of the franchise spinoff - which they had both created together - Nintendo reshaped the Mario RPG concept around a 2D on 3D picturebook-inspired story design, and the Paper Mario franchise was born. After the success of the first Paper Mario game on the Nintendo 64, Nintendo released two sequels to the title as well, first with the Game Cube hit Paper Mario 2: the Thousand Year Door, followed by the Wii's more action-focused Super Paper Mario.

Other details about the new Sonic-based RPG project fall anywhere between scarce to nonexistent at the present time, but expect further details to emerge as they come.

Sources:
IGN, BioWare Creating Sonic RPG for DS, http://ds.ign.com/articles/798/798275p1.html