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. But to current and former fan gamers, it’s inspirational-it bridges what we thought was an impassable gulf. (I was still going through puberty.) To anyone with even a casual affection for video games, Sonic Mania is a great game. The looming threat of legal action prevented fan games from ever transcending the tight-knit circles of the bedroom developers who made them, and the thought of using my own characters and concepts hadn’t yet occurred to me. In the mid-2000s, the ceiling for fan games was understandably low. A defiantly dysfunctional Mario fan game I co-created in middle school entitled Let’s Go Thingio! is still my most celebrated creative work, which is telling. I, too, have roots in the fan game community, although I am nowhere close to being in the same league as Whitehead. (Sega’s previous dalliances with bringing Sonic back to his 2D roots have been bed-shitting failures for this reason alone.) But Sonic Mania’s chief architect is a young Australian developer named Christian Whitehead-who cut his teeth as a member of the Sonic fan game community. Its approximation of the original Sonic games’ physics engine is uncanny, and as any Sonic fan will tell you, this is no small feat. Sonic Mania plays like a game that would have been made by veteran game developers. Mania has been slobbered over by every outlet under the sun (including, thank heavens, Forbes, who called it a “ brilliant and focused return to form”). Sonic Mania-the newest Sonic game, which is available on PC and every major game console-seems to have singlehandedly quashed that cynicism, but you don’t need the Mercury to tell you that.
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