Shadow the Hedgehog is supposed to be dead

It’s hard to imagine Sonic the Hedgehog without his Jungian counterpart: the gun-toting, swear-uttering Shadow the Hedgehog. But Shadow is a relatively late addition to the series’ extensive roster of anthropomorphic animals, debuting long after the Genesis days in Sonic Adventure 2—more than that, he was never supposed to stick around.

According to a report from One More Game, Sonic honcho Takashi Iizuka said at the recent Tokyo Game Show that Shadow’s popularity was a big surprise to Sonic Team when SA2 came out. “If you have played Sonic Adventure 2, people may know that Shadow basically sort of died at the end of that game,” he said.

“We were originally intending to just kind of ‘die the character out’ (kill him off), but the character Shadow was just so very popular that we decided to revive him in Sonic Heroes.“ He also noted that Shadow is his personal favorite character, and he wants to give him more of a spotlight in the future.

Not that Shadow has ever gone completely by the wayside. He’s one of the only Sonic characters other than, well, Sonic, to have his own videogame (even if it wasn’t exactly acclaimed) and he was more recently the star of Sonic X Shadow Generations, the best version of one of the best Sonic games on PC. He also remains a fan-favorite among modders, who have the cure if you thought Sonic Mania ought to have been Shadow Mania. We would also be remiss if we didn’t mention that the great Keanu Reeves went on a personal journey to voice the beloved bad boy erinaceid.

Sonic Team’s relatively lenient fangame policy follows a long history of granting fan whims a hand on the proverbial wheel. How might the world be different if Shadow had truly died at the end of Sonic Adventure 2? We would have never gotten to see him play Olympic-level sports against Bowser, I guess.