Shinichi "Touma" Higashi, the former Sega artist perhaps best known for creating the character Fang the Sniper in the Game Gear title Sonic the Hedgehog: Triple Trouble, has teamed up with Sega to create a bunch of new vinyl figures based on Sonic and friends.
Higashi, in case you're unfamiliar with his career, first joined Sega in 1993 and went on to contribute to a ton of Sonic games as an artist during his time at the company, including Sonic Chaos, Sonic Drift, Tails Adventure, Sonic 3D: Flickies' Island (the Saturn version), Sonic Jam, and Sonic Adventure; that's in addition to several notable non-Sonic-related projects like NiGHTS into Dreams, Burning Rangers, and Skies of Arcadia.
He later left Sega in 2001 to pursue a career as a freelance toy designer, establishing his own toy design business, TOUMART Inc., in 2005, which is one of the three companies behind this latest line of figures (alongside Sega and T-Base Toy).
Higashi announced the exciting news of this collaboration yesterday on Twitter/X, calling the new release "a very emotional project".
In his post, he revealed that the ten figures will include new sculpts of series regulars like Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Metal Sonic, and Dr. Eggman, as well as other, more obscure characters like Mighty, Ray, Trip, and Higashi's "firstborn son", Fang.
Each figure will reportedly stand at 4.3 inches tall, and will be displayed publicly later this month at Designer Con 2025, taking place at the World Market Center in Las Vegas (Nov 14th - Nov 16th).
Right now, the plan is to release the figures exclusively in Japan, but Higashi is talking to the manufacturers about the possibility of a US release.