Was Sonic Colors Always Going to be a Wii Exclusive?

[SonicFanForLife]

The recent talk about Sega porting older Sonic games to the PC made me reflect on how Sonic Colors (console version) was exclusive to the Wii. Do you think there are possibly early builds of the game for the Xbox 360, PS3, or PC that were abandoned during development before it became a Wii exclusive? Sonic Colors didn't have any Wii specific features like the Storybook Series.

[Stritix]

Iizuka did say the game was designed for Nintendo audiences. I would assume the game was always intended as a Wii exclusive unless it was a different project earlier in development.

[Rexeljet]

I understand that Sonic Generations was originally planned to come out on the Wii and DS, but those versions were cancelled early on, presumably before any development started. This is just speculation but my guess has always been that Sonic Colours was conceived after this decision was made so that the Wii and DS would still get a major Sonic release in lieu of a Generations port, much like how Secret Rings came about because porting Sonic 06 to the Wii was considered unfeasible

[Blue Blood]

I believe that internally, Colours Wii actually shares a lot of filenames and other similarities to Generations. The implications I think is that both projects started at a similar time and shared resources, but were always entirely separate. 

[Roger_van_der_weide]

Pretty sure I read an interview with Iizuka somewhere that Sonic Colours got born because of Sonic Team being shocked at the succes of Mario and Sonic at the Olympics game, and thus immediatly started gunning for the Nintendo Crowd. So I would say, yes.
I don't have the interview immediatly handy at the moment tough.

................
Edit, okay so here's the interview, tough the wayback machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120509153249/http://spong.com/detail/editorial.jsp?eid=10110209&page=2
Specific quote:
"Takashi Iizuka on Appealing to Mario Fans
"From a general game design perspective, in recent years we've been able to introduce Sonic to new fans, a lot of the Nintendo/Mario fans, and because of that, we've made changes to the design, and we've designed things in Sonic Colours that we think will really appeal to people who are unfamiliar with the Sonic brand and the Sonic gameplay. So from that perspective we hope that fans of Mario will really be able to enjoy playing as Sonic in Sonic Colours."

He later says this, which is closer to what I remembered from the interview:
"The reason why I said 'younger audiences' is because the team and I wanted to capitalise on the new audience that we gained through the success of the Mario & Sonic games. Those titles in particular really worked well for Sonic as a character because it made our potential audience much broader than existing Sonic fans."

I guess that doesn't confirm it was made for the Wii exclusively, but does strongly imply it was specifically tailored toward Nintendo fans.

[SonicFanForLife]

7 hours ago, Blue Blood said:

I believe that internally, Colours Wii actually shares a lot of filenames and other similarities to Generations. The implications I think is that both projects started at a similar time and shared resources, but were always entirely separate. 

 

8 hours ago, Rexeljet said:

I understand that Sonic Generations was originally planned to come out on the Wii and DS, but those versions were cancelled early on, presumably before any development started. This is just speculation but my guess has always been that Sonic Colours was conceived after this decision was made so that the Wii and DS would still get a major Sonic release in lieu of a Generations port, much like how Secret Rings came about because porting Sonic 06 to the Wii was considered unfeasible

I haven't thought of that before. The games being in development at the same time would explain that. Are some of the files in Sonic Colors similar to Generations' files besides the filenames?