Taxman and Stealth: The Story behind Sonic Mania's Fans Turned Developers

everyone knows about the sonic cycle right the safety of its pessimism is almost set in stone the sonic cycle is the rule to which expectations of these games are held which made the reaction to comic con's announcement of sonic mania quite a surprise to me this optimism is an outlier of the sonic cycle it's not normal so that triggered questions like why are people excited about sonic why are they doing a 2d game now and most of all who the hell is the tax man although way less people are talking about this other game which does seem to fit right into the cycle mania is kind of shaking things up a bit but to know why requires a bit of esoteric knowledge about a history of fan games and rom hacks that go back over a decade so let's get to it the taxman is christian whitehead a sonic fan game developer who in 2007 demoed a fan game simply titled retro sonic for the sonic amateur games expo the big deal with this game is that it's running on its own engine written in c plus running in windows via its own executable it's a platform built to create the same capabilities as the 16-bit originals and for the most part it looks feels and sounds pretty sharp all things considered controls and physics are actually a little more responsive than the 16-bit originals which might be why your character doesn't seem to agree with all these tiny little tunnels sometimes which is really the only garish example of this game's fan made origins shining through the cracks but what's more of an actual demonstration of this engine is sonic nexus a game not made by taxman but rather headed up by a different fan game dev group led by a guy named slingerland but it does show off taxman's engine in sharp fashion flaunting not only how many wacky effects it can pull off but also just how darn smooth and crisp the engine actually is level designs have a lot of hold right straight runs to them but it's fun to see what sonic would play like without the frequent frame drops of the old genesis hardware nor the sluggish controls of the original game design making the frame rate and the character just a little bit faster ends up being a shocking revelation of what might have been holding sonic back this whole time meanwhile as far back as 200 taxman's future partner in crime a person named simon thomley who made fan games under the forum alias stealth and now develops professionally under the company named headcannon was making a level editor for sonic romhacks called son ed 15 years ago he was trying to sell that editor for 30 then 15 dollars in the early days of web 1.0 which proved fruitless though as users redistributed it for free causing him to eventually leave the rom hacking scene for a few years until deciding to build his own darn engine what is now called the head canon game engine includes a fan map that's hardly stellar but the real purposes behind the whole endeavor just like taxman's retrosonic engine was to build something that could do a one-to-one recreation of an original sonic game and the included remake of green hill zone does exactly that except of course for having a much higher frame rate it stays locked at 60fps no matter how much clutter is on the screen but if you want a more complete example of a project cultivated under stealth swing then you can look at the multi-modder effort called sonic megamix a collection of high quality sonic fan levels that aren't running in his own engine but rather going back to his history as a rom hacker by modifying a 16-bit rom to be run in an emulator or printed onto a cartridge which means that the emulated genesis hardware here is buckling under the weight of this thing frame drops are common once again but the sheer quality of the first three levels here was so high that i bet demand for an old-school 16-bit sonic game would have waned if public knowledge of rom hacks like these was more widespread what starts off feeling like just a solid pack of custom sonic levels eventually teeters closer to sequel territory with the much needed feature of a forward-facing camera rolling out alongside levels that seem to understand the fragility of speed and the fair but foreseeable reflex challenges that make it interesting in a way almost better than the original levels did power-ups and defeated enemies are placed in the middle of jump routes and incoming obstacles are signposted with subtle cues from the little bit of it i played megamix just has excellent level design but development on many of these fan projects was left incomplete as the 2000s gave way to the 2010s after taxman pitched a concept video to touch arcade and later to sega of his own port of sonic cd running on an iphone in 2009 realizing that his proposed solution might be a superior alternative to selling an emulated version of the game sega actually accepted his pitch they hired him for the job turning taxman into one of the few fan game turned official game developers and it went well the mobile port of sonic cd is considered the fan favorite definitive way to play the game nowadays though there is a 5 version of it on steam get this amazon's giving it away for free if you install their stupid app anyways the whole game is rebuilt for a widescreen ratio and touch friendly menus but what makes it feel less like a port and closer to a remaster is how many tiny little problems with the original game they were able to fix by remaking the engine from scratch the puny old spin dash animation the original game used is fixed the issues with the intro fmv are fixed too hell even the loading times that were annoying but not really a big problem on the sega cd version are fixed you can play as tails you can play with a japanese soundtrack and you are effectively playing a version of the game that feels like it's faster and more responsive than the original but after playing the two back to back i couldn't immediately spot any differences with this port's physics and controls instead the difference is made in two critical areas that do so much to fix a lot of what makes these games hard to return to the 60fps lock keeps sonic consistently predictably controllable no matter what's happening and extra view space from the widescreen ratio makes incoming obstacles easier to see coming and thus sonic suddenly makes way more sense than it ever did before christian whitehead the taxman then partnered with simon thomley the stealth man to develop mobile ports of sonic 1 and 2. with all those similar improvements alongside extra levels based on cut content only seen in previews from the 90s pretty sweet stuff among all the doom and gloom that follows sonic around these days you don't really see anyone hating on these mobile ports which brings us to how you don't really see anyone hating on sonic mania right now at least this project breaks the sonic cycle by virtue of just how much of a different cloth its developers were cut from sega recruited from the fan game community to build this one there is little to no association with sonic team nor dimps the studio is responsible for the countless blunders of the past instead taxman and stealth have a solid track record of doing this sort of thing they've lived entire lifetimes of building retrosonic games from scratch it's hard to say we'd see this level of passion and authenticity come from any kind of traditional studio in fact out of the three collaborating companies working on this game the most traditional studio is pagoda west games who two years ago shipped their own fast curvy platformer major magnet which didn't set the world on fire but hey it's still genre experience meanwhile mania's greater frame rate view distance and moveset than the classics all address issues that people have when going back to the classics the dropdash can have you regaining lost momentum quickly rather than slowly wading in and out of the usual wind-ups plus it seems like the extra time and budget that sega presumably had given this game went into the kind of visual polish that similar projects haven't been getting just look at how many frames they drew for his menu pose and compare that to sonic 4s hell we're already seeing more view distance and level gimmicks going on than sonic 4. that's good plus a cheaper pixel art side project where using a lot of assets won't have to deal with the problems of having a bad story with bad voice acting from bad characters or reinventing the way the game works with bad gameplay concepts all of which are problems that have perpetuated and popularized the sonic cycle of hyping up disappointing games which are probably gonna be this thing's problems but not this thing i feel like for once we kinda know what we're gonna get out of a sonic game for once it's coming from reputable developers who have shown in the past that they know what they're doing and can ship products complete and on time for once it's being revealed a solid year before launch and it looks like they already have a lot to show for once a sonic game announcement is being given the same hype and optimism as any other well-respected video game franchise would have received but since this is sonic we're talking about that means it's news

Channel: Super Bunnyhop

Views: 474,695

Keywords: sonic the hedgehog, sonic mania, sega, sonic, trailer, gameplay, analysis, playstation, xbox, sony, microsoft, nintendo

Id: omKGDC4JaMU

Length: 9min 16sec (556 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 28 2016