Sonic Mania was released the same day as the phenomenally popular indie RPG Undertale got a rerelease on the PS4 and Vita, and both games have similar origin stories: Undertale auteur Toby Fox got his start making ROM hacks of Nintendo’s cult RPG Earthbound, the most popular of which is 2008’s The Halloween Hack. While Sonic Mania feels suspiciously like an unearthed retro Sonic game, it is little more than an officially licensed fan game. This led to iOS ports of the first two Sonic The Hedgehog games for Sega Genesis also running on Whitehead’s engine, which in turn led to the development of Sonic Mania, a completely original game running on the engine.
A longtime member of the Sonic gaming community Sonic Retro, Whitehead achieved internet notoriety with his fan game Retro Sonic, which features an earlier version of the engine that would end up being used in Sonic Mania.Īfter pitching a proof of concept to Sega for a port of Sonic CD running on his retro engine, Whitehead was poached by the Japanese company to develop an official port of the game. Whitehead falls into this category of fan gamer. The Furbies is one of the games that was removed from Game Jolt-many fan game developers are just focused on deconstructing, and recreating, classic game engines.
While there’s some weird stuff out there- Mario & Luigi Vs. And, at the end of last year, Nintendo launched a full-scale DMCA crackdown against internet game host Game Jolt that resulted in the removal of over 500 fan games. Nintendo-which, for years, seemed more or less indifferent towards fan-made content in an “ It’s quiet… too quiet” sort of way broke their silence when they stopped production of an unofficial Zelda movie. Some developers go after fan-made projects more aggressively than others (Square-Enix shut down a complete 3D remake of the Super Nintendo classic Chrono Trigger in 2004, for example). Unlike emulation, which in most circumstances is considered piracy, the legality of fan gaming is more ambiguous. Beginning in the 2010s, gamers and game critics began asking themselves whether or not Sonic was ever even good in the first place.
#SONIC MANIA SERIES#
By the time Sonic Unleashed managed to at least partially nail the concept of a 3D Sonic game, diehards-myself included-had more or less written off the series off. While the first two Sonic Adventure games are charming for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with gameplay, every 3D Sonic game prior to 2008’s Sonic Unleashed is wonky at best and unplayable at worst. The cause of Sonic’s regression from industry icon to interminable bad joke is still unclear, but it likely comes down to a combination of high fan expectations and Sega’s utter inability to effectively bring the series into 3D. (Also see: Jazz Jackrabbit, Street Sharks, and Battletoads.) Sonic went from being one of the most recognizable game characters in existence-and the epitome of playground cool-to an anachronism hailing from the era when anthropomorphic animals could be considered badass.
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