Take

I mentioned having an interest in gaming-related videos, and one of the biggest, strangest and diverse subcultures is certainly the one around Sonic.

A few years ago something interesting happened. Christian Whitehead, known in the community as The Taxman, came to an agreement with SEGA to revamp and re-release Sonic CD on iOS and Android. He did this using his own Retro Engine, with which he'd been making Sonic fan games for a number of years. This led into remasters of the original Sonic the Hedgehog as well as Sonic 2, and eventually also to him pitching a new game to them. That game became Sonic Mania.

Sonic Mania essentially continued the tangent of where Sonic was heading after the sibling installments of Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles, and was better received than any Sonic title in recent memory – all the more impressive since SEGA's own attempts at following it up with the episodic Sonic 4 foundered, and recalling SEGA's walk in the wilderness with several cancelled projects after Sonic 3.

In both instances, SEGA tried to forget what had brought them there, or take something new and retrofit it. In the years after Sonic 3, they were caught up in a wave of consoles hastily making the transition to 3D spaces using still-early technology, and made the decision that continuing a 2D approach wouldn't work. And with Sonic 4, they tried to retro-fit the eventually occasionally successful 3D Sonic to the 2D formula, without paying attention to the dynamics that came to define not only the player's experience and memories but also how everything else had to be designed to interact well with Sonic's controls and the player.

I am about as nostalgic as you could be, but ever since Sonic Mania was released I've been waiting for the announcement of whatever comes next. Sonic Mania was announced as a one-off to honor fans and the series' own history (a task it performs admirably, the attention to detail and lore goes deep), but ended up demonstrating that the idea of the 2D Sonic games still worked (and with the DLC/physical release Sonic Mania Plus, that it was open to expanded mechanics).

In a world that works the way it should work, the minds behind Sonic Mania are now working not on Sonic Mania 2, but on the next step the original series would have taken, a game that isn't retro, but also not just re-painted with "assets" from more contemporary 3D-line Sonic titles. A game that tries to treat today's technology as something to be used in the way the original games approached then-current 16-bit technology, instead of as a crutch for reproducing the same old painting. A game that perfects the foundation and uses it to build a new and wondrous thing. A game that gets back in the driver's seat and gives the fans what they didn't yet know they wanted, instead of just paying homage to their obsession.

In order to make Sonic as great as it used to be, they need to be courageous enough to stop making Sonic the way it used to be.