Not Even Sonic Origins' Developer Is Happy With The Game

It seems like "Sonic" video games can't go more than a week without upsetting somebody. "Sonic Frontiers" continues to make headlines, with fans asking Sega to delay the game to improve its quality. "Sonic Origins," a remastered collection of the first three "Sonic The Hedgehog" games and "Sonic CD" has also managed to upset people. The game has multiple different editions you can buy, with confusing combinations of DLC and extra content. "Sonic Origins" is also missing some of the original music from "Sonic 3 & Knuckles" due to licensing issues, and the replacement tracks are upsetting fans.

Now that "Sonic Origins" has been in gamers' hands for a few days, people are also noticing a ton of glitches and issues not present in the original versions of the game. These glitches are a great source of frustration for one of the developers who worked on the game. 

Headcannon Games' Simon Thomley, also known as Stealth, took to Twitter to express his displeasure. "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," Thomley tweeted. While Thomley acknowledged that his team did know of a few bugs that they couldn't totally fix, many of the problems in the game allegedly came from Sega stitching the package together.

According to VGC, one of the biggest reasons for the game's bugs is apparently the way in which the collection was put together from disparate elements. The "Sonic CD" remaster was done by Christian Whitehead, and then Whitehead worked with Headcannon on the remasters of the first two games. Lastly, Headcannon remastered "Sonic 3 and Knuckles" by itself, with Sega developing the compilation itself in-house. When Sega compiled all the games into a single package, it apparently created further issues.

"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 tweeted. 

In his Twitter thread, Thomley addressed the fact that the project was under constant pressure from Sega, which refused to delay the project despite the Headcannon's concerns. He also said that Sega has not responded to his team's request to work on post-launch updates to fix some of the issues with the game. Thomley ended by letting people know that Headcannon is aware of the issues and that it still wants to make things right. Unfortunately, Thomley also said that speaking publicly about these problems could result in Sega not working with his team again in the future.