Sonar is one of Dispatch’s most iconic characters, in no small part thanks to Charles ‘MoistCr1TiKaL’ White’s deadpan performance and constant championing of developer AdHoc’s work. However, art director Derek Stratton claimed that “he was never meant to be in the game”.
It’s hard to imagine now, given that Sonar is one of two characters who can turn heel in the finale and join Shroud’s siege of Los Angeles after being fired from the Z-Team, but in the original plans, he was a one-off gag at SDN headquarters.
“I’m pretty sure he was just meant for that moment where Invisigal and Robert are arguing in the kitchen, and he’s like… there’s just a Bat-Man in the kitchen that is disturbing them by screeching,” Stratton told IGN.
“This Guy Is Awesome. I Want To See Him More.”
Plans completely changed, however, when the team saw the concept art, and like fans eventually would over the last month, they fell in love with the oddly normal-looking human with a giant bat head. “[AdHoc] had some generic sketches of background characters and stuff like that,” Stratton explained. “Everybody kept pointing to [Sonar] being like, ‘Who is this guy? This guy is awesome. I want to see him more.'”
It wouldn’t be long before Sonar went from the screeching background character to the douche-y crypto bro, as AdHoc started to flesh out what would become one of MoistCr1TiKaL’s defining roles. As for the big, monstrous bat design that would come to mark Sonar’s impulsive side, “It was just like, ‘Make the coolest looking bat you can possibly make,’ right? That’s all it was,” Stratton said.
AdHoc is done with Dispatch for now, moving onto a new game set in Critical Role’s Exandria universe, but everyone from the community to Robert Robertson himself, Aaron Paul, is hoping to see the team return to its spandex roots in the future, even if he thinks it “could end perfectly” as is. “I hope that you and I get to do multiple seasons of this game,” Aaron Paul said to Cr1TiKaL. “I hope we get to do more.”
So, maybe we’ll see Sonar again one day. After all, AdHoc co-founder Pierre Shorette said that the team will “have to at least think about” a second season. In the meantime, there’s plenty to chew on in Dispatch, and I already know I need to go back and right the wrong of booting him from the team in my next playthrough.
