Poor old Sonic.
Sega’s speedy mascot is one of video gaming’s enduring icons, but sometimes it’s difficult to see why.
When the ring-hogging hedgehog burst emphatically onto the scene in the early 90s, he looked (literally) unstoppable.
But we don’t need to tell you that, unlike Mario, Sonic’s shift into the third dimension has been troubled at best, and to this day there still hasn’t been a truly excellent 3D Sonic game. Nothing anyway that can hold a candle to some of the plumber’s genre-defining adventures.
We’re obviously holding out hope that next year’s Project Sonic will do the business, 100 per cent fan-made, nothing-to-do-with-Sega Sonic Utopia looks like the modern-day Sonic game we’ve all fantasised about.
Created entirely from the ground up by The Great Lange and a programmer named Murasaki, Sonic Utopia looks like it takes that sense of frantic speed from the original games and adapts it admirably for a 3D game world.
The trailer’s blurb reads: “Sonic Utopia is an experiment that not only tries to expand on Sonic gameplay in an intuitive way in 3D, but also aims to capture the best of Sonic’s style and tie it together in a cohesive experience. Nearly everything in this demo, from art to sound to the gameplay engine, was made from scratch.”
We can’t imagine Sega would embrace a version of their most famous series made by anyone other than their own approved developers, but we can all daydream.
You can also play an admittedly rudimentary build of the game here (for now).
