What inspired Sonic's look?

The red shoes came first in his telling and they have an exact source. In Ohshima's 2009 interview with Gamasutra, he said: Sonic's shoes were inspired by the cover to Michael Jackson's Bad, which contrasted heavily between white and red, that Santa Claus type colour. The red did double duty, because he also thought red suited a character who runs so fast his legs spin, and the plain red and white bands, no laces, no detail, read clearly at speed and at sprite size. The most copied silhouette in gaming footwear is an album cover's colour contrast, redrawn.

The blue is corporate and deliberately so. Ohshima, same interview: he's blue because that's Sega's more or less official company color. The mascot wears the logo. The rest of the palette is contrast engineering around it, warm tan arms and muzzle against the cool blue, the red shoes as the accent that moves. When Uekawa redesigned Sonic for Sonic Adventure in 1998 he darkened the blue and took the green of the eyes from Green Hill Zone; that later chapter belongs to the covers page, linked below.

The species was chosen twice, once by artists and once by gameplay. In the design contest coverage from GDC 2018, planner Hirokazu Yasuhara recalled that a hedgehog is a character you can imagine dealing damage by curling up like a ball and rolling around, which made it the candidate that turned Naka's rolling ball engine demo into a hero. Hedgehogs also carried the right obscurity: familiar enough to recognise, unused enough to own. Yasuhara's other stated aim was a character little kids could draw, simple shapes, circles mostly, which is why the design survives being doodled by ten year olds worldwide.

Behind the contest drawing sat a piece of private world building Ohshima shared at GDC 2018: a fictional World War II pilot, nicknamed Hedgehog for the hair that spiked up when he flew fast, whose jacket carried the story into a children's book written by his wife, with Sonic painted as the plane's nose art. Ohshima's documented fascination with wartime nose art is where the character's backstory began before Sega ever saw him. It is the strangest documented item on this shelf, and it is on the record from the designer himself.

The reference record of Sonic's design describes the drawing's construction as indebted to two classic cartoon animals: Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse, whose round heads, simple ears and white gloved, three line hands Sonic's design clearly echoes, the same cartoon grammar Ohshima grew up on. This part is presented here exactly as sourced: as the standard account of the design's construction in the character's reference record, rather than as a sentence Ohshima is quoted saying. Where the inspiration is his own words, the shoes, the blue and the hedgehog, this page has quoted him; where it is the record's summary, it says so.

Ohshima has also been plain that Sonic was, in his words, squarely aimed at the U.S. market, designed from his image of America rather than from Japanese mascot convention, which is why the attitude arrived with the character instead of being added by marketing later. The American redraws that then softened him anyway are the subject of the covers page, and the design mandate that aimed him at Mario is its own page, both linked below.