Where did Billy Go? Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg (2003 | GameCube)

Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg (2003 💫 GameCube)

Yuji Naka, the co-creator of Sonic the Hedgehog and longtime head of Sonic Team, came out of Sonic Adventure 2 wanting to build something new, telling Nintendo Power around that time he was frustrated that so much of the industry just recycled old franchises.

Sega still leaned on the connection when it came to selling it, putting Naka's name and his Sonic pedigree on the box, and even letting Sonic himself show up in-game as a hatchable bonus animal. But underneath that, the actual game was something else entirely, a boy in a chicken suit rolling an egg the size of a boulder through a world called Morning Land. Sega put it on GameCube in 2003, a deliberate choice, Naka felt the console's audience would actually get what the game was going for.

The design leaned into that difference on purpose. Where Sonic Adventure 2 had Chao, small digital pets you raised and fussed over, Billy Hatcher filled its world with animals that hatched out of eggs mid-run, meant to feel like adventure instead of upkeep. The whole game built around a single mechanic, grow the egg, crack it open, see what comes out, and there was nothing else in the genre doing it that way.

Critics mostly liked it. Sales didn't follow. It sold poorly enough that Sega never funded a second game. A PC port showed up in 2006, but that was the closest thing to a follow-up the franchise ever got.

Billy didn't disappear completely. He turned up in Sega Superstars, in Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity, in the original Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing. But when Transformed rolled around in 2012, his own friends Rolly, Chick, and Bantam made the roster and he didn't. The reported reason was that nobody on the team could figure out how to turn him into a vehicle.

Did you play Billy Hatcher when it released? Have you revisited the game? 🥚