To understand how Sega thinks about its most famous mascot, one must appreciate how differently people responded to 2008's werewolf version of Sonic, the Werehog.

That creature, who was playable in the combat sections of last year's Sonic Unleashed, "came in for so much criticism," Sega of America's vice president of market, Sean Ratcliffe recalled for Kotaku during an interview with Sega execs in New York earlier this week. "If you read all those things, and we do — maybe not quite every single one, but the vast majority of them — and it's amazing the sort of diatribes you get. But if you sit down with a group of 8, 9, 10 year-old boys, completely different story."

You can't please them all, Sega has learned.

"If you read everything, we need to be all things to all gamers with Sonic, and that's a difficult thing to do," said Mike Hayes, the head of Sega Europe and, as of last month, the head of Sega of America as well. "Trying to put everything into one game and making everybody happy is impossible. And I think that's something clear going forward."

So as Sega proceeds to, in Hayes' words, "review our Sonic road map," fans young and old should prepare for an approach that will produce Sonic games that won't satisfy everyone at once.

Sega's core Sonic target, in fact, isn't those who grew up with Sonic. It's those who are growing up now. "It very much is in that under 12 group," Hayes said. "And what we have to do is make a Sonic that is of a quality that delights that audience, first and foremost. I'd argue that we very much achieved that with products like Sonic Heroes on PS2, and I think we did that with Mario and Sonic 1 on Wii and DS. I think we did it some ways with Sonic and the Secret Rings on Wii. I think [the Wii's Sonic and the] Black Knight was a good game."

Hayes is less satisfied with Sega's execution of those Sonic games that have been on the more powerful Xbox 360 and PS3 platforms. "I think we've had challenges with [the 2006] Sonic the Hedgehog and Unleashed," he said. "[The 2006 game] Sonic the Hedgehog sells extremely well at a budget price. So clearly it's very popular with a young audience. But first and foremost is: We've got to make a quality game for that audience. Does quality mean it's got to be a Metacritic 90 percent? Well not necessarily. It's just got to be quality that's appropriate for them. Then we've got our core fans, and what we need to do is now and then produce a Sonic that will appeal to those fans specifically. "

It's that last group — those core Sonic fans — who seem to be the ones grumbling most on sites like this one about the fate of the franchise. Hayes suggested some ways Sega might produce a Sonic for that community: "Often it can be looking at another take on the nostalgic take on Sonic. Or re-issues. They're very popular. Fans do like that."

One suggestion I'd seen from readers was for Sega to take a page from Nintendo's return-to-the-roots release of New Super Mario Bros. a few years ago and create a new Sonic game that played in a side-scrolling format similar to the original games. While not committing to whether Sega would or already is planning anything like that, Hayes used the question as a way to discuss the differences between continuing the Mario and Sonic lines and to discuss a third brand few gamers have likely ever thought of in the same sentence as Sega's Hedgehog.

"But in its day, Sonic was the Modern Warfare," Hayes said. It was, in other words, the edgier thing, the game series that was cooler, more grown up, than Mario." Hayes admired that, even when he worked for five years at Nintendo. "Mario was very much the toy brand," he recalled. "Although it was hugely successful, sometimes we looked enviously at Sega with this cutting edge. Now the world has moved on since Sonic achieved that. Sonic can't compete with Modern Warfare 2. It can't. Whereas, Mario I don't think has ever been anything other than appealing to that demographic."

The difference, Hayes, explained, is that even as Sonic could no longer be the edgiest thing in console video games, Mario could always target his same cheerful crowd. A New Super Mario Bros. wasn't, in Hayes' mind, as much a return to the series' roots as a continuation of a franchise style that was always relevant to Mario's original kind of audience. "They've had a consistent strategy," he said. "Whereas, with Sonic, I think you have to take it … to a different target audience. Sonic has to go through a metamorphosis as to the type of game you would design."

Hayes and the rest of Sega want to make the old-time Sonic fans happy. They just need those fans to not expect their Sonic in every Sonic game. So… the plan? Most of it is not being revealed, yet, of course, but the general strategy is to make core Sonic games pretty much every other year, "character derivative" games between those and, on occasion, off-shoots that involve Sonic doing new physical activities such as playing tennis, skateboarding (as in Sonic Riders), or racing cars, as in the upcoming Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing.

The Sega brass hopes their plan will generate something Sonic for everyone. "Trying to appease all those audiences is really hard," Ratcliffe said. "But we are flattered, because we've taken nostalgic fans with us on a journey for almost 20 years and they're still passionate about Sonic."

The head of Sega West, Mike Hayes, told me Wednesday that, despite the pride Sega has in the Dreamcast, it has no formal celebration to celebrate the 10th anniversary of its launch in September.

"Generally we won't be doing anything that's official," he said. The main reason is that Sega has reinvented itself as a software company. And it's important for us to focus on the other platforms that are alive and current."

"Informally, because there are people in the company who were involved in the Dreamcast launch, there will be celebrations," he said, "But as a company, publicly, that's going to be something we're going to be pretty low key about for obvious reasons. We're effectively a different company."

Hayes said that Sega has reinvented itself as a software company, which makes it more fitting to focus on other company's hardware. "It's not to disrespect the excellent system the Dreamcast was," he said, "Or the innovations that were done on it, which I think were probably a few years ahead of time in terms of the online application. I just think we as a company are multi-format and we want to talk about our first-party platform partners rather than when we were a first-party."

Dreamcast hardware may not the focus of any official Sega efforts, but Dreamcast software still has a future. Sega has aggressively distributed much of its older back catalog of games as digital downloads on home consoles, PC and portable machines. The Dreamcast line-up, comprised of bigger games, less easily brought to current platforms, is not going to be neglected, Hayes said. "I can't give you any details. Suffice to say, there's a lot of technical issues, a lot of licensing issues. But we are very keen to bring [them] to players in the way we've done with Genesis games. We want to do it, but it's hard work to get there. Hopefully we can build on that quite soon."

Sega West president Mike Hayes said that theories about the economic recession forcing so many games to be delayed out of the remainder of 2009 were wrong in the case of Bayonetta.

"It was purely practical reasons to be perfectly blunt," Hayes said in an interview with Kotaku yesterday. "Bayonetta's coming out in Japan [this October] but we then need to translate it…. that is one issue. The bigger issue, is that in the western markets, unlike in Japan, bringing out new [intellectual property] in that November period, really, really, really is a challenge."

Sega executives had hoped to launch the game in the U.S. in September or October, when they feel original games still have a chance to thrive. Sega's own Alpha Protocol, a new role-playing game set in the world of modern espionage, still has its 2009 date because it is hitting in mid-October. Anything later and it too may have been given a bump, Sega reps say.

In recent weeks it had become clear to Sega's top team that Bayonetta could be ready for American gamers no sooner than the launch windows for some of the year's biggest sequels. "If we could have launched it — the translation would have made it a challenge — it would have been late November or early December. And we just think that's a point when consumers are spending all their dollars on Need For Speed, Modern Warfare…hopefully [Sega's] Mario and Sonic."

Instead, Bayonetta gets an early 2010 slot. "We saw how well Capcom did with Lost Planet," Hayes said, citing the successful launch of that original game in January 2007.

While Sega isn't providing a narrower release window for Bayonetta than early 2010, it's clear that the game will be part of a new traffic jam filled by the many games that were originally slated or were recently delayed to early next year. BioShock 2, Dark Void, (maybe) MAG and a host of others were recently dropped in there to swim with Mass Effect 2, God of War III and other big games.

All those games make early 2010 "busy," according to Hayes. "It does create a problem for publishers and retailers. I think it's great news for the consumer, because coming out of Christmas there will still be a big line-up of fantastic titles. We just need to be sensible when we're launching these to make sure we're not launching all of these on February 10 or whatever the date may be. We need to space things out to make sure retailers are happy to merchandise them and make sure consumers aren't bombarded with everything at once."

Here's how things are working now. Sega of America and Sega of Europe CEO Naoya Tsurumi is now responsible for Sega operations in all three major markets, adding Sega of Japan to his rather large plate. Meanwhile, Mike Hayes will be stepping into the newly-created position of President & COO of both Sega of America and Sega of Europe, which more than likely entails a great deal more air travel.

"I'm delighted to be heading up the SEGA Western territories at such an exciting time in the company's resurgence as a leading videogame publisher around the globe," said Hayes. "As shown at E3 last week, SEGA has a winning line-up of titles over the next 12 months and beyond. The management changes announced today will ensure that SEGA's Consumer Business is positioned for long-term growth and success."

Hopefully this new, unified Sega will continue the recent trend of not doing anything with the Sonic franchise other than the odd racing or sports spin-off to appease the kids, while delivering daring new experiences like Bayonetta and MadWorld, even if the latter sold like hotcakes laced with poison.