A new Sonic game is in development, producer confirms

Sonic Team is working on a new Sonic the Hedgehog game. Takashi Iizuka, the series' general producer, confirmed as much in an interview with the Japanese outlet 4Gamer at Tokyo Game Show 2026, published on 21 September, and the confirmation is deliberately thin: a project exists, and nothing else about it is being shared yet.

Iizuka was blunt about the limit. As for the new title currently in development, he said, there is nothing specific he can talk about yet. What he would offer was the ambition behind it - through characters, story and game systems, and a range of other approaches, the team will create play that has not existed before - and a request that players look forward to it.

Both Sonic lines stay in play

Iizuka said the team wants to grow the 2D classic series and the 3D modern series together rather than choosing between them. He named Sonic Colors and the Colour Powers it introduced, and Sonic Frontiers and the open zones it opened up, as the two turning points that reshaped how a Sonic game plays, and pointed to Sonic Superstars as evidence that the classic line still has its own direction.

Tokyo Game Show showed no new Sonic title

The confirmation is not a reveal. 4Gamer states plainly that TGS 2026 passed without a new Sonic announcement or exhibit. What SEGA's booth carried instead was SONIC PICO PARK, the TECOPARK-developed collaboration, and a display tied to Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, the racer announced shortly before the show. Iizuka said he has been playing the in-development build of SONIC PICO PARK and now looks forward to each new stage added to it.

Thirty-five years of speed

The interview marks the series' 35th anniversary, which it reached in June 2026, and doubles as a retrospective. Iizuka picked Sonic the Hedgehog 3 as the first title that stuck with him, having joined the project as a planner straight out of university and contributed ideas for Knuckles; Sonic Adventure, where a newly designed camera system was what made the jump to 3D work at all; and Sonic Frontiers, which he called a litmus test for everything that followed.

Our opinion

An executive saying a game is in development is the least surprising sentence in this industry, and it would be easy to file this one and move on. The interview's value is in the detail around it. Iizuka's account of the Sonic Adventure problem - that nobody could work out how to make Sonic run in 3D until the camera itself was reinvented - is a reminder that the series' worst years were not a failure of ambition. The more commercially interesting admission is the 2010 consolidation that put both the Japanese and American teams under one producer, which is roughly when Sonic stopped lurching between incompatible identities. A new game with no title, no platforms and no window is worth recording precisely because the last fifteen years suggest the team now ships fewer, better experiments.