Sonic the Hedgehog · Antagonist · Debut: 1991 · Genesis / Multiple · Created by Naoto Ohshima
Sonic's egg-shaped arch-enemy, a robotics genius bent on world domination — called Eggman in Japan and Dr. Ivo Robotnik in the West until Sonic Adventure joined the two names.
Doctor Eggman made his full debut in Sonic the Hedgehog on the Mega Drive in 1991, after a cameo earlier that year in the TeraDrive game Puzzle Construction. He grew out of Sega's 1990 search for a mascot to rival Mario: one of the rejected candidates was a human design by Naoto Ohshima, reportedly resembling Theodore Roosevelt in pajamas, which Sonic Team reworked into the game's villain. Bald and moustached, in pince-nez sunglasses and red, yellow and black, he is a genius with an IQ of 300 who builds armies of robots in his quest for world domination. In Japan he has always been Doctor Eggman. Sega of America renamed him Doctor Ivo Robotnik for the Western release of the first game, and the two names coexisted until Sonic Adventure (1998), which used both; later games treat Robotnik as his surname and Eggman as a nickname he has embraced. Yuji Uekawa redesigned him for that game. Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine (1993) is the only game that puts him at the centre, and he has appeared in cartoons, comics and the live-action Sonic films, where Jim Carrey played him.
For most of the 1990s, players in Japan and in the West knew the same character by different names. The split began with a localisation decision at Sega of America and lasted until Sonic Adventure, after which the games reconciled the two rather than choosing one.