2005’s Shadow the Hedgehog has gone down in infamy since it first released, being the game that allowed Sonic’s rival to wield guns and say some relatively light cursewords. It turns out it was almost much, much worse.
Jason Griffith, the voice actor for both Sonic and Shadow at the time, chatted to GameLuster at Momocon over the weekend and he dropped the revelation that the studio was originally unsure of whether or not the game would get an M rating. As a result, they asked Griffith to voice two versions of each line. The one we got was relatively tame, but the other option, well… This is what Griffith had to say:
“They were going for an M-Rating with this game and they hadn’t heard back from the agency if they were going to get it yet. So they had me record two takes for every line, and I swear, the version that was for the M-Rating, they had me say f*** in every single line. It was just every sentence, I would be yelling ‘Sonic, give me that f***ing Chaos Emerald!’ or something like that. I had no idea what was going on but I just went with it, and I had fun. There’s a hard drive somewhere with hours of recordings of Shadow yelling f*** at Tails and Sonic and stuff”
Shadow the Hedgehog eventually came out with an E10+ rating and was maligned by critics though some fans have re-evaluated the game since, and later this year we’ll be seeing elements from the game return in Shadow’s new chapter in a new Sonic Generations port to Switch and other modern consoles.
Written by Tom Brown
Whether it’s an exciting new entry in a series long established or a weird experiment meant only for the dedicated, Tom is eager to report on it. Rest assured, if Nintendo ever announces Elite Beat Agents 2, he’ll be there.
