It's remarkable to hear what happened next – in short,
nothing happened. "There was no response," reveals Cerny. "When I finally asked, I was told that it was unsalvageable; that the character design was so bad, there were no comments that they could make that would help turn it into something saleable. What I heard was that they were going to be launching a project to 'educate' Sega of Japan about what good characters looked like. They were either very inspired by – or were going to be bringing in – Will Vinton, who, amongst other things, was famous for creating the
California Raisins commercial. This was to show Sega of Japan how characters really needed to be designed. Of course, the game came out, we had a price drop on the hardware within the space of one or two months, and our sales went up by a factor of five. That was the end of any conversation about how bad a character Sonic the Hedgehog was!"
