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Australian programmer Christian Whitehead created the Retro Engine for use with a 2007 fangame entitled Retro Sonic, which is based upon the original Sonic games released for the Sega Genesis. The game became notable after its release for its accuracy to the games, despite not being a ROM hack or modification to an existing Sonic game. [3]
Retro Sonic is a 2D Sonic game created by Christian Whitehead. It is the first game to use the Retro Engine (the engine used for the 2011 remaster of Sonic CD), and later merged with two other Sonic fangames, Sonic Nexus and Sonic XG, to form Retro Sonic Nexus, a collaboration project led by Whitehead. [9]
The remasters of Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic 2, and Sonic CD are based on the Retro Engine-developed remakes released between 2011 and 2013, while Simon Thomley and his studio Headcannon, who worked on Sonic Mania (2017), developed the remaster of Sonic 3 & Knuckles.
Art, level design, audio, and additional programming were provided by independent studios PagodaWest Games and Headcannon. The team used Whitehead's Retro Engine and aimed for a graphical quality between Genesis and Sega Saturn games. Sonic Mania was released in August 2017 and became the highest-rated Sonic game in fifteen years.
In 2009, Whitehead produced a "proof-of-concept" video of Sonic CD running on an iPhone using his own custom engine, the "Retro Engine". [4] [5] In an interview with Steven O'Donnell of Good Game: Spawn Point, Whitehead proclaims that he spent "about a year or so" convincing Sega to let him work on the Sonic CD port. [6]
A Sonic Retro user began developing a homebrew Saturn game based on X-treme, Sonic Z-treme, in March 2017, and released a build in September 2018. Eurogamer described Z-treme as combining X-treme-style ideas and levels with new concepts from the developer, and said it was an impressive effort. [41]
That September, he explained his Sonic/Jackson conspiracy theory in a post on Sonic Classic, one of the countless message board communities that dominated early-2000s Internet culture. Jackson's "Jam," the lead track on "Dangerous," sounded a lot like Sonic 3's "Carnival Night Zone," Mallinson -- aka "Ben2k9" -- argued.
With Sega's diversification of its studios, R&D #8 became Sonic Team in 2000, with Naka as CEO and Sonic Team USA as its subsidiary. Sega's financial troubles led to several major structural changes in the early 2000s, the United Game Artists studio was absorbed by Sonic Team in 2003, and Sonic Team USA became Sega Studios USA in 2004.