Amigo has finally stopped rattling his maracas on the sidelines. SEGA pushed the Samba de Amigo Content Drop live for Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds in the early hours of September 9, and the Dreamcast-era party mascot is now a free playable racer on every platform the game runs on. He also arrives with a footnote that matters more than the character himself: according to SEGA, Amigo is the twelfth and final free character of Year One.
That makes today a soft ending as much as an addition. CrossWorlds launched on September 25, 2025, and the year since has been an unusually generous one for a full-price kart racer — a dozen racers handed out at no cost, on top of the paid crossover packs running in parallel. Amigo closes that ledger, and the next wave of content shifts over to a second Season Pass.
Everything in the Samba de Amigo drop
The package is small but complete, in the way SEGA's free character drops have consistently been. It contains:
- Racer: Amigo — the monkey himself, maracas included.
- Skin: Amigo (Classic) — a throwback look for players who remember him in arcade form.
- Machine: Locomotive de Amigo — his signature vehicle, and easily the most literal name in the garage.
- Three new Jukebox tracks — "VAMOS A CARNAVAL – 2023 Ver.", its Final Lap variant, and "Let's find and shake it". All three are Jukebox-only, so they play in menus and races rather than being tied to a new course.
Worth flagging before anyone goes hunting: SEGA notes that an internet connection is required to claim add-ons, and the game has to be updated to the latest version. If Amigo is not showing up in your character select, that is the first thing to check.
The Samba de Amigo Festival runs this weekend
To mark the release, SEGA is running a Samba de Amigo Festival from September 10 at 8:00 PM EDT through September 13 at 7:59 PM EDT. It works the way the previous character festivals did: race during the window, bank Festival Points, and cash them in for exclusive items.
SEGA attaches the same three caveats it always does, and they are worth reading rather than skipping. Gadgets earned in the Festival may later be distributed through live updates, so nothing here is guaranteed to stay exclusive. Festival rewards may also become available by other means down the line. And deleting your save data wipes Festival rewards permanently — they cannot be re-earned.
How Year One actually played out
Amigo is the last name on a list that got longer than most people expected. The free additions and the paid packs have been running on separate tracks, and it is easy to conflate them, so here is the shape of it.
On the free side, the standouts were Goro Majima — billed as Captain Majima, with the Goromaru as his machine — who arrived on April 30 alongside a Steam free weekend for the base game. Classic Sonic followed on June 24 as part of the Ver. 1.4.1 update built around Sonic's 35th anniversary, bringing the Mach Cyclone, anniversary music, fifteen collaboration decals, eight new Gadgets and a batch of competitive balance changes. Axel from Crazy Taxi rolled in on August 26 with the Devolada Yellow Jack. Amigo makes twelve.
The paid crossovers have been the louder half. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Pack dropped on July 29 with all four turtles, the Pizzafire Van and a full New York City course — a proper content pack rather than a character reskin. Separate Mega Man, PAC-MAN and Minecraft packs have also shipped, reaching players either through the Season Pass and Digital Deluxe Edition or as standalone purchases.
Year Two is where the money is
SEGA confirmed a Season Pass 2 during Summer Game Fest, and it is the reason the free-character tap is being turned off rather than left running. The second pass covers six further DLC collaborations and is slated for fall 2026, with the first two already named: Godzilla and Evangelion.
That is a notable escalation. The Year One crossovers stayed largely inside SEGA's own vault or reached for gaming neighbours — Sonic, Crazy Taxi, Samba de Amigo, Persona, Mega Man, PAC-MAN, Minecraft, with TMNT as the outlier. Godzilla and Evangelion are a different category of licence entirely, and putting them behind a paid pass is a clearer statement of intent than anything on the roadmap so far.
The phrasing SEGA used about Amigo also leaves a door open. Calling him the twelfth and final free character of Year One is not the same as saying free characters are finished. It reads much more like a reset than a full stop, which would fit a game that has spent twelve months building goodwill by handing racers out for nothing.
A very deep cut, for the record
For anyone whose Sonic knowledge does not extend to the Dreamcast's stranger corners: Amigo is the mascot of Samba de Amigo, a 1999 rhythm game built around a pair of maraca controllers that shipped as a genuinely expensive peripheral. It got a Wii revival in 2008 that swapped the maracas for Wii Remotes, and then Samba de Amigo: Party Central on Switch in 2023. He is, in other words, exactly the kind of character a SEGA kart racer exists to resurrect — and sticking him in a locomotive is the sort of joke that only lands if you already know the maracas came first.
Where to get it
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is available on PC via Steam and Epic, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2, with cross-platform matchmaking pooling every version into one online population. The Samba de Amigo Content Drop is live now on all of them, and the Festival opens Thursday evening.
