It turns out not even Sonic X Shadow Generation's developers knew Keanu Reeves would be in the movie-themed DLC
"When we received the recorded voice files, we listened to it and felt, is this that actor…?"
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The movie version of Shadow the Hedgehog is coming to Sonic X Shadow Generations, but most of Sega didn't even know Keanu Reeves would be back for the game.
Yesterday, during Sony's most recent PlayStation State of Play, Sega showed off a bit of bonus Sonic X Shadow Generations DLC that features, unsurprisingly, Shadow, but surprisingly, it's based on the events from the upcoming third movie - and it even has Keanu Reeves voicing the character. While only brief, the DLC looks incredibly fun, and Shadow's model has been made to resemble his movie counterpart, and Reeves voicing this version is unexpected considering how unoften movie stars do video game voice over work like that. But, funnily enough, in a post from the official PlayStation Blog, series producer Shun Nakamura shared that most of the devs didn't even know that Reeves would be voicing Shadow for the DLC.
When asked if he had any fun stories from working with the Sonic movie team, Nakamura explained, "Information on the movie was revealed to very few members even within Sega, so when we developed this content, we worked with very limited materials, which were provided by Paramount. We primarily discussed and worked with Iizuka-san who clearly knew about the movie too. We actually haven’t seen the final scenes in the movie yet, so we are excited to see how close our game ends up being to the movie!"
On working with Reeves, Nakamura went on to explain that it was "an incredibly secretive process, so when we started to implement the voice in the game, we actually weren’t told who this voice is. The voice recording was handled by Iizuka-san in the US, so when we received the recorded voice files, we listened to it and felt, is this that actor…?, so we were also surprised after the official announcement from Paramount!"
The DLC movie pack is out December 12, a full week and a bit ahead of the film's release on December 20, and is already included with the Digital Deluxe Edition of Sonic X Shadow Generations.