Rob Burman of IGN UK does a commendable job of interviewing Yojiro Ogawa on the upcoming rat-racer Sonic and the Secret Rings. Despite the professional and very patient questioning, the Rings director comes across as bored with everything, annoyed with the interviewer, and really put-upon by his station. All in all, a great interview. Click through for highlights. Note I refuse to say “after the jump” because that’s so overused. Dang, I just did it!

Some of the information gleaned from this interview, as the director would have us believe:

Porting the 360/PS3 Sonic the Hedgehog would have taken too long, since they would have had to wait until that game was done before starting the Wii port. So the fact that the Wii version is different is as much due to time constraints as it is to do something original for the Wii control system.

Sega was working on a collection of minigames (see: much of the Wii library) starring Sonic but changed their mind and did Rings instead. There are 40 minigames in Rings, but none were part of that original minigame collection.

It was very challenging to code the game’s responses to the controller’s input for a shaking or thrusting motion, because everyone does that motion a little differently, and the controller sees that slight variation. Eventually they had to settle for having the controller held sideways.

The director claims more of an influence from God of War (which he loves), Shadow of the Colossus, and Prince of Persia than the original Sonic the Hedgehog games that people like me are so inclined to relate the game to in a hopeful way. He explains how he wanted to have a scene where Sonic leaps onto a bird in flight and actually tears the feathers out of it but Sega would not allow such a violent act in the game. He’s hoping to be able to channel some of that into a new Golden Axe game.

If Rings is well-received, it could define a new way for the team to approach future Sonic games. No shock there I guess.

He feels that they couldn’t stop making Sonic games even if they wanted to, because the fans keep buying the games and they would be too upset. Uh… really? I guess that depends on how well-received these new games are. I hear the PS3/360 versions are already a bigger train wreck than Shadow the Hedgehog was.

Via IGN Wii.