Anyone who enjoys old-school games will most likely have experienced the crushing disappointment of finding a favorite title in the App Store — only to discover that whichever company ported the game to iOS took no care whatsoever in doing so.
Fortunately, one game series you could absolutely never throw that accusation at is the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, thanks to the remastering efforts of fans Christian Whitehead and Simon Thomley. For anyone interested in game restoration and porting, their story is kind of inspirational.
Having seen the first stab at bringing the Sonic titles to iOS, and witnessed the sound problems, awful virtual controls, windowed play area and slowdown issues, they created their own ports and posted the videos online. Sega took notice, released the remastered editions, and they became iOS best-sellers.
So far, we’ve gotten remastered ports of Sonic 1, Sonic 2 and Sonic CD, although as of yet no Sonic 3, which may be my favorite episode of the series. With Sega recently falling on hard times, as seen by the shutting of its San Francisco office, it may stay that way, too.
Unless you help, that is.
As you can see in the above video, Whitehead and Thomley have put together a proof-of-concept for an iOS version of Sonic 3 featuring all the gorgeous widescreen action and bonus features we’ve come to expect from the remastered games.
Sega hasn’t shown any interest in releasing them, but Whitehead and Thomley hope that an online Change.org petition will help. Not only can you sign the petition, but they’ve gone one step further, by putting up a letter in Japanese that you can print, sign and send to Sega’s headquarters in Japan.
In an age of Twitter and Facebook, where hashtags and shared statuses are often the furthest we’ll go to support a cause, mailing a physical letter is a definite demonstration of how seriously you’re willing to take something. If enough people send in letters, the hope is that Sega will see the existing audience for Sonic 3 and greenlight the project.
Hey, it’s worth trying!
Via: Touch Arcade
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
4 responses to “You can help speed Sonic 3 onto iOS”
Sega is worthless with iOS apps. Even if they did come out with this, it will just break in the next iOS version upgrade and never get updated. I bought Sonic 4 Episode 2 and it stopped working ever since iOS 7 came out. And they’ve since removed it from the app store.
The remastered games are made by Taxman and Stealth who do update the Apps. Sonic 4 was made by a Japanese team who don’t do many updates.
As littly_kittly said, the team that did the Sonic 1/2/CD remastered versions for iOS/Android are constantly making sure it is compatible with new iterations of devices, not to mention they put so much passion into these things, they’re nearly perfect. As a big Sonic fan, the only thing that stops me from putting these versions over the Genesis originals is that only CD has been ported to PC.
If you haven’t tried them yet, definitely do, you won’t be disappointed.
Sega is very good at listening to campaigns. For example, they listened to the SegaPC campaign and the ones to bring Japanese only games to the west. Hopefully they will listen to this one too. Taxman and Stealth have plans to continue the classic Sonic series well beyond Sonic 3, so I hope the campaign works.