Spong recently did an interview with Chief Producer Osamu Ohashi, and Producer Nobuya Ohashi of Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games. There is a lot of cool info in the interview, but the coolest thing was the info on why a Sonic & Mario platforming game never happened.
Osamu Ohashi: Prior to this project there has always been a discussion between Nintendo and Sega about bringing Sonic and Mario together somehow. But every time we talked about it, there was an issue as to exactly how we could achieve that.
These characters come from two totally different backgrounds, and have completely different worlds. If you do any kind of collaboration, you can’t just get them to run on one of the Sonic stages or vice versa. You have to create something from scratch, a neutral location. Nintendo and SEGA never managed to agree on just where or what kind of universe we could set a Mario and Sonic adventure in.
Then, some time ago, SEGA secured a license to create games based on the Olympics. At that point I came up with the idea of having Mario and Sonic compete with each other in the Olympic games setting. We proposed that idea to Nintendo and they were really positive and interested in the idea, so that is where we started building it into a concrete game proposal.
This was my dream growing up as a kid. I’m glad to see that someone was trying to make it happen.
[Source: Spong]
I could see that, Mario’s no fun in 2D, and Sonic doesn’t have the best 3D track record in the world. Still, it wouldn’t have hurt to try! :p