Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is the brand-new entry in Sega’s long running Sonic Racing series. Behind its colorful cast of characters and a lively, party-game-like appearance, lies a fully skill-based racing system. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise if you’re familiar with the fact that the Initial D arcade team was closely involved in development of CrossWorlds, with its controls and gameplay being a culmination of almost 20 years of accumulated know-how. However, the mechanics and gameplay itself are not just a simple blend of Sonic Racing and Initial D – as the devs say, the game is based on Sega’s “secret sauce.”
Recently, AUTOMATON got the opportunity to have a chat with CrossWorlds creative director Masaru Kohayakawa and former Initial D arcade series producer Kenji Arai, who shared tidbits about the game’s development and told us about some of Sega’s racing classics which CrossWorlds mechanics were built upon.
According to Kohayakawa, the way drifting works in Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds doesn’t actually come from Initial D. Apparently, the base game design can be traced all the way back to the Sega Rally series. “Driving behavior in the Initial D arcade series was controlled by one programmer who’s been doing that same job ever since Sega Rally. Now, one of their students oversees the behavior programming for Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds. Also, when creating the driving behavior for CrossWorlds, they actually used Sega Rally’s game design as a base, not the Initial D arcade series,” Kohayakawa explained.
But while Sega Rally helped set the foundation for CrossWorlds, the devs actually used OutRun, Sega’s 1986 classic racer, as a reference for the game. As Kohayakawa notes, the programmers themselves claimed that the “satisfying feeling” of drifting controls in OutRun was a major reference point for CrossWorlds.
Kohayakawa also explained that they technically don’t consider OutRun a part of their division’s “DNA,” as it was developed by the Sega AM2 dev team. However, he presumes elements of OutRun found their way into CrossWorlds because the forementioned Sega Rally programmer’s student actually worked as part of Sega AM plus, a development team which branched out from AM2. Though its background sounds slightly convoluted, the devs suggest that all of these components – Sega Rally’s foundation, OutRun’s inspiration, Sumo Digital’s intuitive controls and Initial D’s DNA – were necessary to make Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds what it is now, which is why they were very conscious about making the drift mechanics feel satisfying.
As Kohayakawa puts it, “Sonic CrossWorlds has the secret sauce of Sega. It extracts and combines the essence of not just the arcade Initial D, but also legendary titles like Sega Rally and OutRun.”
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is out now for PC (Steam, Epic Games Store), Nintendo Switch, PS5/PS4 and Xbox Series X|S/Xbox One. A Nintendo Switch 2 digital edition and upgrade pass are scheduled for release this Winter.
