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The Sonic Origins collection launched this week with a number of bugs and issues, and one of the developers on the project is speaking publicly about what went wrong.
“This is frustrating,” Simon ‘Stealth’ Thomley of Headcannon says on Twitter (opens in new tab). “I won’t lie and say that there weren’t issues in what we gave to Sega, but what is in Origins is also not what we turned in. Integration introduced some wild bugs that conventional logic would have one believe were our responsibility – a lot of them aren’t.”
This is frustrating. I won’t lie and say that there weren’t issues in what we gave to Sega, but what is in Origins is also not what we turned in. Integration introduced some wild bugs that conventional logic would have one believe were our responsibility- a lot of them aren’t.June 24, 2022
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Headcannon is a software development studio run by Thomley, which worked on the mobile remasters of Sonic 1 and 2 alongside famed community developer Christian Whitehead. Those two ports, as well as Whitehead’s Sonic CD remaster, were folded into the Origins collection, as well as a new remaster of Sonic 3 & Knuckles developed by Headcannon.
However, Thomley says that the Sonic 3 remaster was originally “a separate project that was then wrangled into something entirely different” for Origins. Thomely says that the Headcannon team did make “some actual mistakes, some overlooking, [and] some rushjobs,” but claims that Sega denied requests for delays and last-minute fixes, and made major changes to the submitted build.
“I’m extremely proud of my team for their performance under such pressure, but every one of us is very unhappy about the state of Origins and even the Sonic 3 component,” Thomley says. “We weren’t too thrilled about its pre-submission state either but a lot was beyond our control.”
Thomley notes (opens in new tab) that the team’s dealings with Sega of America were “very pleasant for the most part” and that “I am not fighting with Sega.” Thomley says that “we offered to come back for post-release fixes and updates – we do not yet know if this is happening.”
Players have reported a number of issues with the collection so far, including poor audio quality, buggy new features, and poor AI from companion characters. The PC version, which also includes the controversial Denuvo DRM, is currently sitting at a “mixed” user review aggregate on Steam (opens in new tab).
We’ve reached out to Sega for comment and will update if we learn more.
Sonic Origins has also made the Sonic 3 and Michael Jackson saga even more convoluted.
