Sonic's Schoolhouse remains one of the weirdest things to come out of the Sonic series, at least with the blessings of SEGA. Its presentation, purpose and mere existence defies what the Sonic series was and would become. It's basically a meme of some sort. But it is unironically better than Mario's educational games.
But there is one thing nobody wants to talk about. Why does this game exist? Since I'm a bit of a media sleuth, and by that I mean I just bother to google shit and put together my findings, I'm gonna try my best to potentially find out why this game came to be.
History
The year is 1996, the Saturn is SEGA's principal console at this point, and they were without a mainline game for their flagship franchise, due to stress and other factors halting the development of Sonic X-Treme, but that's a tale told by someone who'd know more about it than I do. They managed to keep the series afloat with auxiliary titles like a remake of Sonic 3D Blast, Sonic R which itself is a forced meme and the compilation Sonic Jam.
So SEGA's goal at this point was to keep the property relevant and gain whatever new players they could, then someone just said edutainment down the hall and SEGA of America was like, fuck it.
Major gaming franchises are no stranger to edutainment, albeit, gaming franchises that appeal to young and old like Mario, Rayman and Sonic. At the time, a combination of both would be beneficial. They could throw a stake into the edutainment market and gain new fans who'd be enticed to check out the mainstream counterparts, and be used by parents and maybe teachers for lessons, it's scummy, but a win win that's legal as far as anyone's concerned.
Not to mention, edutainment titles in general were pretty popular back in the day [citation needed] as gaming was just as popular, so there was a pretty open market for it.
With the exception of Rayman Brain Games, these kinds of edutainment titles would be outsourced to third-party developers while the first party would continue to develop yet to be new installments to the main series. But when you take into account Sonic's Schoolhouse's developers have quite a limited backlog that goes well against what was asked of them here, it's another can of worms.
We'll get back to SEGA in a while, for now, I wanna go into the developers.
The game's development is credited to two studios, BAP Interactive and Orion Interactive. Both companies were only involved in two games, this included, but their other titles are more adult, with the former's being a game based on a horror slasher movie, and the latter's being an adult mystery game. These developers are different, but they all share one connection, two men by the name of Brad Krevoy and Steve Stabler.
For the uninformed, these are two unknown game developers, but no, they are pretty well known... in the film industry. Krevoy and Stabler ran a production company known as Motion Picture Corporation of America, dedicated to more unconventional independent films, but they do have some notable titles to their name.
They produced classics like Dumb and Dumber, Bio-Dome and Kingpin, as well as disasters like Bloodwings: Pumkinhead's Revenge and Dracula 3000. You may be thinking, well of course this game turned out bad, they have no experience with game development, and you'd be mostly right. They didn't develop games, they just helped publish them.
MPCA managed a video game label in the mid-90s, mainly joining the then thriving FMV market with games based on their own movies, namely Bloodwings: Pumpkinhead's Revenge and Soldier Boyz (who's game is an early directorial role for Darren Aronofsky if you could believe it.) The former game, was developed by BAP Interactive, or Bruce Austin Productions for a fuller identity.
Bruce Austin had no experience with game development before Bloodwings, but he managed to get away with it because of an easily exploitable engine, made possible by DOOM. DOOM was freeware, and had a basic 3D engine that can be easily manipulated, at least on a PC. If not, at the very least once you get the knowhow you can reuse it to your heart's content.
At this point, MPCA had access to a working game engine. But where does Orion come into play? Well obviously, this was a subsidiary of a pre-bankruptcy Orion Pictures, but get this, Krevoy and Stabler actually became co-presidents of Orion after the latter's parent company Metromedia acquired MPCA in 1996, the same year Sonic's Schoolhouse would hit the scene.
Full disclosure, Krevoy and Stabler would help produce Orion's second and last game Blue Heat, Orion essentially became a pseudo-successor to MPCA's gaming division.
And that's why the game has two developers, Orion (through Krevoy and Stabler) funded and sold the game while using an engine produced by Bruce Austin for their Bloodwings game, Austin also conceptualized the game apparently.
But now the big question, how did they convince SEGA to let them produce an educational game? Well, they didn't exactly come to that at first. This was intended to be a solitary educational title with a talking clock as its main character, with the other files indicating that theory. One thing I should remind you on is that the edutainment genre was going strong at this point, and they were obviously gonna cash in with some value titles. Either that was so, or both assets were gonna be used until one was taken out for redundancy.
It seems SEGA wanted to cash in on this as well, but perhaps due to the lack of a mainstream title to fall back on, feared that it'd leave a big dent in their investments, but then again they commissioned Traveller's Tales for Sonic R and the Saturn port of Sonic 3D Blast. This is on SEGA of America due to its overall inception.
One credited executive producer was Greg Suarez, who had previously and afterwords worked on two titles for Delphine Software International, Fade to Black and Shaq-Fu. He seemed to have been the one who formed SEGA Entertainment, an edutainment label for the purpose of, well you tell me, and they sought developers willing to create an edutainment title based on that blue hedgehog.
Perhaps through a call to action, Orion pitched their game to SEGA and, perhaps wowed by an otherwise unique pitch or for a lack of better ones, worked with them to reconvert the game to fit the Sonic aesthetic. Since SEGA held onto the assets meant for Sonic X-Treme (that was developed by SEGA Technical Institute and not Sonic Team), and seeing that it could fit with what was provided to them by Orion already, they were able to incorporate Sonic aspects quite easily.
So... did it pay off? Well I imagine it sold well enough to get re-released through Expert Software, who also re-released old SEGA titles on PC, barring any reviews who'd be harsh to low-budget educational games regardless.
Conclusion
And there's an idea for why Sonic's Schoolhouse came to be. When you take into account what I told you it gives some interesting perspective. Austin would take some etcetera work over the years, as Orion themselves were undergoing financial issues the gaming division would be doomed regardless and Orion would die in 1999... only to be revived years later.
As for Brad Krevoy and Steve Stabler, they're still around, though both run separate companies. Stabler currently runs Commotion Pictures while Krevoy continues to manage MPCA to this day, though he abandoned independent filmmaking and is now focusing on Christmas telefilms for Hallmark and Netflix, which is more or less continuing a polarizing filmography, but hey, we all wish we can get a steady income like that.
Now here's the big question, why was Sonic played by a girl even though he had a male voice in the cartoons? Simple, the cartoons are not cannon to the game, so Sonic's main voice hasn't been determined at that point. Also if the initial build theory is anything to go by, they had the actor for the talking clock already, so they had to do with what they got.
As for why the playable characters are so creepy, you can owe that to general programing incompetence.
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