The team wanted Sonic Heroes to appeal beyond Sonic series fans and so designed a game that did not depend on the continuation of its predecessors. Sonic Team USA's Yuji Naka and Takashi Iizuka led the game's 20-month development. The game was the first multi-platform Sonic game, produced for the GameCube, PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Windows platforms. Sonic Heroes abandons the action-adventure and exploration-based gameplay of its predecessors Sonic Adventure (1998) and Sonic Adventure 2 (2001) and instead returns to the linear style of Sega Genesis-era Sonic games.
Within each level, the player switches between the team's three characters, who each have unique abilities, to overcome obstacles. The player races a team of series characters through levels to amass rings, defeat robots, and collect the seven Chaos Emeralds needed to defeat Doctor Eggman. Sonic Heroes is a 2003 3D platform game developed by Sonic Team USA and published by Sega as part of the Sonic the Hedgehog series.
