Sonic Mania is the best kind of reunion show – the one that’s better than your memories. While it is dressed up in Sega Genesis graphics, it far exceeds the potential of that old hardware. Levels are directly inspired by the five classic Genesis games. If you ever played a 2D Sonic game before, Sonic Mania will be a faithful retread for you. But Sonic Mania is not just nostalgia. It’s one of the best games of 2017 for both the veterans and the newbies.
The game is a happy piece of revisionist history. Imagine an alternate universe where Sonic Team, hot off of the heels of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, never tried to go into 3D. The Sonic Adventure era of embarrassing storylines never happened. Utterly broken games never happened. Instead Sonic stayed simple, fun, and two dimensional. That’s Sonic Mania: the Sonic game that should have been made in 1995.
Historical narratives aside, Sonic Mania is still a damn good game. Sonic has never moved with more frames and more fluid animations. Levels are full of creative twists, disorienting turns, and as much fun as a 2D platformer can offer. Sonic Mania doesn’t just play with the past, it offers the series a bright future.
Fandom Takes Over
Sonic Mania is the debut of Christian “Taxman” Whitehead, a superfan of the truest sense. Whitehead cut his teeth making fan projects, learning to build his own Genesis-era Sonic games from scratch. Eventually, Sega recognized his talent and let him build his dream project in Mania.
This is a compelling story: a developer letting in its fan community. In an age where most fan projects are answered with lawyers instead of encouragement, Sonic Mania is the happy exception. Hopefully, this can be a model someday for rebuilding franchises.
Looking the Part
Taxman has rebuilt everything about the old Sonic games. Mr. The Hedgehog still has a lot of momentum to overcome when he starts running. No matter how many rings you have, you still die instantly when you’re crushed. It’s authentic to the point of madness. One can imagine a Manhattan Project of top scientists spending a year studying the angular momentum of Sonic’s spin dash to perfectly recreate it.
Sonic Mania even has a few little details added for no reason other than to seem retro. Sonic can outpace the screen when modern consoles can easily keep up with his blast processing. There are graphical filter options to make the screen look like an ancient CRT display. Even the 3D UFO Chase sequences are built mostly out of sprites rather than polygons.
And the polygons used are crooked and basic. The devs are totally in love with the past, but they’re not purists. They have the sense of humor to laugh at the warts. There’s a reference to Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine in one of Sonic Mania‘s most amusing moments.
Original and Retro
Sonic Mania is a product of nerdy obsession. But it is never so retro that it’s inaccessible. Everybody is welcome, not just the old fans.
Of the 12 stages in the game, eight are remakes of previous zones from Sonic 1 through & Knuckles. Christian Whitehead and his team show they are more than cover artists in the four original zones. These take Sonic to completely new places like a Wild West Zone and a Hollywood Studio Zone. For those looking for nothing but the old hits, you’ll be surprised to learn that the best parts of Sonia Mania are the new tracks.
Even then, the old stages are not ripped whole cloth. Much like Sonic Generations, Sonic Mania isn’t copying the old stages. It’s using them as inspiration for its own levels. An old player might be able to plow through the familiar beginning of the Green Hill Zone with their eyes closed. However, as the stage continues, the level mutates into something else entirely. You’ll need your eyes open for the chameleons, zip lines, and extra routes Mania added.
What’s fun, though, is how the new pieces play with the old. The fire shield from Sonic 3 is available in the Green Hill Zone, so you can actually burn down those pesky spiked bridges. The Flying Battery Zone is filled with a graveyard of broken robots. Old bosses return, but they always have a fun twist that you won’t expect.
Surpassing the Classics
The conclusion to draw from Sonic Mania is not that people wanted old Sonic games again. The old Sonic games never went anywhere. You could get Sonic CD on your phone these days. You could play Sonic the Hedgehog 3 on about ten different consoles. A ROM of Sonic 1 is a bonus in Sonic Generations. I never played the Genesis games until I bought a collection for the Nintendo DS in 2010. Getting that old Sonic feeling has never been hard.
Instead, what’s great about Sonic Mania is that it’s a new old Sonic game. Yeah, there’s recycled stuff here, but the most impressive levels are the ones that never appeared on a Sega console. You can feel real passion from the developers to make something unique and special. They aren’t slavish to the material, they’re playful with it. Nostalgia might be the selling point, but Sonic Mania‘s success lies in its own creativity.
I want to see that creativity again. If people like Christian Whitehead and his collaborators are working on these games, we won’t have a Sonic 2006 ever again. Sonic Mania isn’t just following the classics, it’s beating them at their own game.