Artist claims Sonic Origins Plus devs stole their work without giving credit

An artist has claimed that Sonic Team, the developers behind Sonic Origins Plus, stole their model of Amy Rose and left them uncredited.

Sonic fans likely remember Sonic Origin’s reveal in 2022, thanks to the controversy surrounding the game’s Standard Edition and its use of DLC.

Now that Sonic Origins has been out for a year, it is receiving a new version called Sonic Origins Plus. The multi-game collection adds even more content like a playable Amy Rose.

Following the expanded version’s release, an artist with work under DC Comics, Archie Comics, and even SEGA themselves, has insisted that Sonic Team used their model for Amy Rose in Sonic Origins Plus without giving them proper credit.

Artist claims they were uncredited in Sonic Origins Plus

The claim came from artist RafaKnight on Twitter, who tweeted a GIF of two Amy Rose models swapping. They said, “So, here is the Amy model ripped from Sonic Origins Plus. And the one I have made in 2016. And no, I didn’t [get] credited for it at all.”

While there are a handful of subtle differences between the models, such as Amy’s hair, lighting, and overall smoothness, the two models are incredibly similar. Most notably, the geometry used for the model is nearly identical.

RafaKnight went into further detail in follow-up tweets and confirmed that they were not listed in the game’s credits “for people behind the 3D assets,” or anywhere else.

Moreover, the artist claimed that they believe this very same model will be used for the upcoming game Sonic Superstars. Sega had previously announced the title during the 2023 Summer Game Fest event.

RafaKnight noticed this during the reveal event, with Sonic the Hedgehog’s social media manager even reaching out on Twitter to touch base on the claim. Unfortunately, it seems no communication ever actually took place.

The artist put forward an explanation when asked if this could be a coincidence: “Company wants to get rid of an artist but they want to reuse the work. So they hire another artist to make it all from scratch, but it ends up being an impossible [exact] replica of the original by some mystical mistake.”

At the time of writing, SEGA has not made any official comment on the matter.