Today, we’re rolling out the Craig Stitt art and design papers, a new collection in the Video Game History Foundation Library.
Craig Stitt is a former video game artist and designer who worked for Sega Technical Institute and Insomniac Games during his career from 1990–2005. Among his many projects, Stitt worked on games like Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Kid Chameleon, and Ratchet & Clank, and was the original designer of Spyro the Dragon.
Stitt allowed the Video Game History Foundation to digitize his portfolio, which includes his original artwork, design documents, and development footage. Researchers can see how Stitt designed character and environments, including some unrealized ideas! For example, before Tails existed in the Sonic universe, Stitt had proposed Boomer the Turtle, a new sidekick who Sonic could ride like a skateboard.
Stitt also worked on a large number of canceled game concepts at Sega and Insomniac. The Craig Stitt art and design papers will be many people’s first glimpse of titles like Dark Empires (a canceled Sega fantasy RTS), Treasure Tails (a Sonic spinoff adventure), and Girl with a Stick (Insomniac’s unfinished follow-up to the Spyro series).
There’s a lot to unpack here, so we sat down with Craig Stitt to explore his portfolio in a special video episode of the Video Game History Hour podcast:
We hope you have fun learning about Stitt’s story and exploring his work! We realized that between Craig Stitt, Tom Payne, and Brenda Cook, we’ve now digitized everything by the American contributors to Sonic the Hedgehog 2. We didn’t plan for that, but it worked out!
You can access the Craig Stitt art and design papers for free through the Video Game History Foundation Library.
But wait, there’s more!
That’s not the only collection we’re launching today! As a bonus for fans of American-produced Sega games, we’ve also digitized the original concept art for ToeJam and Earl in Panic on Funkotron by artist Kirk Henderson.
