Sonic the Fighters Inspired a Scene in the New Sonic Movie

By all accounts, Sonic the Fighters seemed like a game everyone forgot about. You scarcely see it brought up in the community, and even as a side tournament, you might only see it once in a blue moon. SEGA themselves certainly seemed to have no memory or care for this game, at least until the recent release of the recent Sonic the Hedgehog 3 movie.

On their socials, the artist suitNtie22 shared some behind-the-scenes details about their work on the movie's credits scene. At this point, the movies have established a trend of retro throwbacks for the end credits, and to represent the progression of Sonic games throughout the years, they had the idea of switching from 2D pixel art to low poly 3D in the latest movie.

Many would probably expect to see the kind of models that might appear on Dreamcast, as Sonic Adventure might just be the first game that comes to mind when people think of 3D Sonic. But no, the first proper 3D Sonic game was actually Sonic the Fighters, which was released for arcades in 1996.

The game utilized the SEGA's Fighting Vipers engine. In fact, the whole reason it exists is that one of the developers at SEGA-AM2 inserted the Sonic model into Fighting Vipers to pitch the Sonic fighting game.

Those familiar with the game will recognise the charming early 3D style that was so reminiscent of other vibrant and clean 3D SEGA games of that era. The people in charge of the movie might have had some appreciation for this as well, so they had picked out those models as the starting point before suitNtie22 even started work on the project.

In the video below, you can see their process for creating each character and the sort of modifications that needed to be made to original models to best suit the movie's format.