Sonic Origins and Sonic Mania developer Simon Thomley has announced his disappointment over the quality of how the games have been released.
In a series of tweets, Thomley, who works for Headcannon, the developer of the first three games in the collection, expressed frustration at bugs included in the final game and at the way Sega rushed development, preventing the company from fixing known issues.
It appears that Thomley was angry at a number of bugs which were included in the final product which he claims were not in the ports that Headcannon produced. “Origins is not what we turned in,” he said. “Integration introduced some wild bugs that conventional logic would have one believe were our responsibility – a lot of them aren’t.”
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However, despite issues which arose after Headcannon handed over its material to Sega, Thomley also spoke about the ports being rushed. Headcannon was apparently refused delays by the publisher and was given unreasonable development deadlines. “I can take responsibility for my and my team’s mistakes, and there were some,” he continued. “Some actual mistakes, some overlooking, some rush jobs, some stuff we noticed but weren’t allowed to correct near the end.”
He went on to say that Headcannon has offered to fix some of these issues such as, audio bugs, clipping, and collision, post-release, but it is still unclear if this will be allowed by the publisher. “We asked to do major fixes near submission but weren’t allowed due to submission and approval rules,” he explained. “We asked about delays early and repeatedly but were told they weren’t possible. We offered to come back for post-release fixes and updates – we do not yet know if this is happening”
Thomley is not the only person who has displayed disappointment at the release of the collection of the four classic Sonic games. Sonic’s creator and former head of Team Sonic Yuji Naka, also tweeted out his disappointment at the changes to Sonic 3’s soundtrack, and simultaneously confirmed a 20-year-old rumor.
“Oh my god, the music for Sonic 3 has changed, even though SEGA Official uses Michael Jackson’s music,” he said in a tweet. While it is likely that these songs were changed due to licensing issues caused by Jackson’s death, it seems that the general bugs are due to rushed development which Headcannon is keen to distance itself from.
Written by Georgina Young on behalf of GLHF.
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