It was never the question of how, it was always the question of why.
Case in point: PC gamers can now experience Sonic the Hedgehog, a game released back in 2006. It was meant to reboot Sonic back to the masses following disastrous previous titles, and introduce the blue blur to the seventh generation of video game consoles, namely the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. However, some of its dedicated players have spent years trying to port the Sonic ’06 to the PC, and now it looks like one of them finally did it. A trailer for what seems to be a demo for the PC game remade entirely in the Unity engine made the rounds on the internet a few days ago.
The question remains: why exactly? If you are not exactly aware, Sonic ’06, simply put, is considered one of the worst games of the series, if not all time. Abysmal loading times, incomprehensibly bad plot, cringe-inducing dialog bordering on complete unawareness, incredibly buggy camera system, numerous game-breaking bugs, unresponsive controls – take your pick, Sonic ’06 has it. It was considered so bad that Sega, Sonic’s publisher, delisted the game completely from its retailers following a somewhat related effort to remove all Sonic games with a below-average Metacritic score in order to increase the value of the brand.
The game, although amazingly bad to the point of post-modernism, still has its loyal fanbase, as what you’d expect from something like the Sonic series (a rabbit hole I would not wish anyone to go down.) YouTuber ChaosX has posted the trailer for the demo video, and from a first glance it seems to be quite the recreation, and I would not be surprised if this runs miles better than the original Sonic ’06. ChaosX goes on to state in the description that the demo is the result of hard work from him and a few friends.
This reminds me of the time when Sega allowed a couple of Sonic fans develop Sonic Mania, and it ended up being incredibly better than what the current Sonic Team under Sega put out. This could mean that the fanbase has something better to offer, perhaps even redeeming Sonic ’06 ever so slightly in the eyes of Sonic fans.
