Retronauts - 701: Sonic Fan Games

Episode Date: July 7, 2025

Stuart Gipp dashes into the long-running, passionate world of Sonic fan games at a hundred Miles Prower with guests Ryan Langley (Rlan) and Lewis Clark! Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This week in Retronauts, I ran out of official games, but I would not stop. Hello, welcome to Retronauts. You already know it's Retronauts. You've heard the theme song. me say the word retranauts at the beginning. You don't need much of an intro. I'm Stuart Jip and I'm here to talk about Sonic again, but I have this time sent both Shamey and Dave into the shed. They're not needed for this episode because I have got what can only be described as a vastly superior set of people in all respects. No, that's, I don't know. I don't mean that. I'm just doing some of my classic jibes. But what I wanted to talk about is Sonic fan games, because it's this, I mean, the Sonic community, we've talked about it before.

A lot of things get thrown at those people, not least bricks, stones, agibes, more cruel jibes, often by me. But one cannot ignore the creativity there, and I will not be doing so either, because we're going to be a showcase now and hopefully a little history for the Sonic fan game scene, which is so enormous. but it hosts at least one, I think it's more than one, a convention of sorts, or online gathering of sorts, every year, because I see them pop up in my video feed,

many of them from Sega Driven. In fact, that leads me to introduce, who's returning this episode to talk about Sonic Fan Games with us? Hello there, I'm Lewis Clark, otherwise known as Sonic Yoda, from SegaDiven.com, and I have been rendered entirely

within the Games factory, meaning that I stick to surfaces, which is really annoying. That does sound quite frustrating, but I mean, to be honest, Sonic also in a lot of the modern games, I find that he sticks to it, surfaces quite a lot. So it's not inaccurate. But joining us for the first time. Who else is with us today?

Good day. Yeah, I'm Ryan, Ryan Langley, and I'm on a quest for 100 rings, exactly. And what happens when you get those? I get to, I guess, finish a game that was made by one guy, in 1997 and was put online and that's about it. Isn't that ultimately what all of us

are striving for to my striving towards? But so, Ryan, what's your connection with this whole crazy Sonic Fan Game world? Yeah, so 25 years ago,

back when I was, gosh, something like 13 or 14 years old, I started a website called Sonic Fan Games HQ, which is a website that still exists today and is still a prominent aspect of all these Sonic Fan Games that are still made today. I like that name because it's just to kind of run the seal of Sonic Fan Game website names and I mean that as a compliment. It's like where am I going

to find these Sonic Fan Games? Sonic Fan Games HQ, boom. Pretty much. It says it all. And Lewis, also your connection with this crazy world of Sonic Fangus. I couldn't think of a second description. I just used the same one again. So I do extensive coverage of Sage every year have been since around 2009, I think, in text on Sega Driven, but then in video from 2012. And when I first got online in probably like 1999, 2000, one of the first Sonic fan sites I ever discovered

was Sonic Fan Games HQ. So Ryan indirectly has an awful lot of thanks for me to basically inspiring an awful lot of what I've been doing online for multiple years now. I don't want to say that I'm like some sort of weird, like, arbiter of taste when it comes to fan games. I just like covering them because I think they're fascinating. I think it's amazing that people make enormous amounts of effort and time to make games that it can only give away for free. I think that's a fascinating side of Sonic fan games that, you know, there's an awful lot. lot of work and effort that goes into it, and it all has to be, you know, release for nothing.

And it's just nice, isn't it, that people are care enough to make something for absolutely nothing. It's got to be, I mean, I don't know about outside of something like Mario, it's got to be the most prominent fan game scene that there is surely outside, you know, not counting things like doom, you know. Yeah, I think it helps obviously that, yeah, Sega have outright said in the past that we're happy for you to do this as long as you don't, you know, charge any money for it because you're using RIP. Whereas I think Nintendo A little bit more The house of Nintendo

Definitely seems to have things Just a smitch On under apps You know like Please don't use our property Otherwise we will send people to your house And Yeah

Repossess everything that you own There are quite a few Mario games But I think the other one Would probably be Mega Man Mega Man Mega Man Yeah that's a good challenge

People can just It's just so easy To make a Mega Man game At this point in time So And yet they won't do it Will they Capcom What's going on

It's a good shout You talk about Mega Man in regards to this Because it's two franchises that totally had a slump That inspired all of this fan game stuff, right? Exactly, exactly Sonic had a slump, I don't know what you're talking about I thought the transition to 3D is It's weird now where when you think about it

It's like it was only really two years Where like a game didn't actually come out Yeah, no, this is it right It was like between Sonic 3D Blast and Sonic Adventure There's not that much time But we were like, no, we demand more There was so much I mean there was actually an episode

It may have gone out by the time this one goes out Which we recorded me, Shea and Shemi and Dave About Sonic's transition to 3D Where there really was quite a lot of upheaval And well, a drama, I guess you could call it And speaking of upheaval and drama fan communities Now, where's the best place to... You know, something you said, Lewis,

though I think we should quickly tag on is Sage because I think we should explain what that is. Yeah, for sure. So the Sonic Amateur Games Expo, Ryan has very kindly written some notes here. So, yeah, started by Blaze Hedgehog in 2002. Is that there, real name? I don't think that's this real name. No, that's Ryan Bloom.

Very active on YouTube still and on Tumblr. Just a great resource for that sort of stuff as well, in himself. Incredible modder to. But, yeah, like, started as just a way. to showcase Sonic fan games. It's always been open to everybody. I think people seem to kind of miss the fact that Sonic Amateur Games Expo was always open to independents and homebrew staff and mods as well.

It's always just been that way. It's just it was started by people in the Sonic fan game community, which is why it gets its name that way. But obviously, it attracts an awful lot of Sonic fan games every year. And, yeah, during event week, I always like to cover it because there's always just loads of really cool stuff happening. Just really fun to see what creativity is out there. It was really started at the time because we basically, people would try to make Sonic Fan games and they would never finish them.

And that was pretty much how all that sort of stuff worked. And so Blaze sort of started this because, like, we need something to make it so that we have, like, a timeline to actually, like, release this stuff. Because otherwise, we're just, you know, never going to finish anything. And it's since been run by, you know, it's still running today. it's a huge thing with like hundreds of different opportunities and what you said there of like Sonic fan games and now a lot of indies a lot of that is just because you can actually make an indie game and release it

that was something that you just could not do back in those days it was either make a fan game or you know or try to make an actual game with actual programming languages there was no game maker there was nothing there but now people who have made fan games can actually go and oh I can actually do this for a living and I can probably make some money off it on Steam because I can just upload it on there.

Yeah, because Sage predates Steam and stuff, isn't it? So you couldn't even just, like, publish a game. You had to do it all independently. You have to have your own hosting, your own way to charge people for the price of admission if you want to do that sort of thing. Whereas nowadays, it's just a nice way to, here's a demo, and we're going to release it on Steam in a year or whatever again. Before sort of diving in, I want to mention real quick, just in case anyone's wondering what I'm doing here, other than posting, obviously. I'm going to bit my hands up and say my experience of Sonic Fanxie. games is much more limited than users because I've played some of these games. That's the best

I can offer. I've got some opinions about some of these games. But I've never really been immersed in it. So the education aspect of this podcast is not going to become from me. There's me shock regular listeners, but I have nothing to teach you on this subject. But if we start with the very sort of earliest stuff that's been sort of noted down here, because I was quite fascinated with this first one, which is a mini Sonic the Hedgehog, which was for the Sharp X

680s. I just pronounced that at 68,000. Yeah, that's the way I heard of it. I heard it. And I had a look at this, and I think this is really, really, really cool looking. Not just the fact that it's got this kind of your 2D Sonic

kind of gameplay, but also they managed to implement a sort of a 3D special stage as well. I was pretty impressed with this and this was this comes from a sort of a star background as well. Yeah, so I mean, there are a couple, so in terms of

like fan games and like what we're talking about as well, there are, you know, a lot of the stuff that we'll end up talking about are things that were made in things like click and play and stuff like that. But there are now, we now know that there were a bunch of sort of fan games made prior to

a lot of what we sort of stuff. So we're mentioning like Mini Sonic the Hedgehog it was made by umihawa kawase who is the uh sorry sorry kiyoshi sakai who made umahara kawase which is a weird it's a very prominent game where it's a girl with a fishing rod in a really hard platformer yeah like a physics space sort of for sness game initially and then it's it came to be a bit of a franchise there's quite a lot of switch titles and steam titles and under that banner now yeah it was like a sness game and then playstation and then I think there was a DS one

but they made a little like a little prototype demo thing back in 1993 of all things that basically was like can I make a Sonic game in this and apparently the answer is yes it's really quite impressive it's fascinating who it comes from

and it makes me wonder if I'm not sure what if I think Umahara Kawasei wasn't that much longer after 93 I think it was a reasonably late Snowsket No, it was 9-4, it was the next year. So I do wonder how much of the physics idea sort of, of course, carried forward.

I mean, Sonic's a physics game at its heart, so I do find that quite fascinating. And that's always been the hardest thing for fan games to actually try to figure out. And if anything, that's like the driving force behind people, especially in early fan games. It was like, how to actually make this feel like a Sonic game is part of where we got to. Yeah, no, I think that's the real fascinating thing with minisonic, for sure, because there is that momentum-based physics in it, which is just so absent in the early click and play in Games Factory stuff. So that's really cool. I like as well that if you look at Minisonic the Hedgehog

and compare it to the look of Umihara Kawase, it's like, oh, of course it's the same person. You know, like you instantly can see the similarities in their style, that sort of pastel colored look to it. And yeah, obviously a similar use of physics and momentum because Zumi Hara's got that sort of ninja rope style thing like worms for getting around, which obviously. uses a lot of momentum physics-based stuff

and minisonic does the same sort of thing where you have you have slopes that he interacts with and actually gain speed and momentum through it's it's very impressive. I never really thought of in my hara-coa say it's having any sonic sort of DNA whatsoever until now and now it seems so obvious you know it's like oh yeah

yeah but that's yeah but what others were there this sort of this early on what else was cropping up right before this was kind of a thing so Ryan's put down Blaze, which I'm really chuffed he brought up, actually, because I forgot about this. I've got it on my little

Amiga 500 Mini. So, yeah, the Blaze was developed by Keith Bugager, I think is how you pronounce that, and prototyped in 1993. I think it was sort of, the idea here was that it was being demoed and shipped around to publishers

to see if they would, you know, take it on as an actual full game. But it didn't find one. But yeah, he dumped a prototype that he made fairly recently and it's an incredibly accurate physics-based momentum-based Sonic clone essentially

it doesn't have rings as you know they're the main source of health you do actually have a three-point health gauge in this instead but you're running around stages using momentum and physics you can go around loops it's just remarkably well achieved for something this

early in the history of fan games yeah there was quite a lot I mean, there was quite a lot of Sonic blood on the Amiga in things like their version of Mr. Nuts and I'm pretty sure Sonic himself turns up in... There's a game where he just randomly appears. Oh, Adventure's a Quick and Silver? Yeah, Eventually Quick and Silver, yeah.

That's a real fun one. Yeah, so it's interesting to see that there was something so close running on the Amiga. Do da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-ha. But this is a sort of example. of something that's like I don't know how to describe it I mean Blaise that the character

if the character is named Blaze which of course Sonic Sega later ripped it off yeah they've ripped it off later with the cat obviously but it's it's very obviously got those kind of those it's got DNA

from a few different games in there there's visuals that I look very familiar in this that aren't just from Sonic but I assume if it had ever become like a full thing than some of those serial numbers would have been filed off to a greater extent than they were.

But there's also Samaria has been mentioned here and I think you've got to talk a little bit about Samaria which was this kind of hacked together Ness version of Sonic 1 which I think a lot of people who are on the emulator

train at a certain time will be familiar with this because it was still very much a novelty to have Sonic and Mario interacting long before the Olympics in this way although this is significantly less official I mean I was looking at this again

because I played this back in the day and I have to find I mean the Mario Sprite is so comical to me He's got such long legs Yeah Mario is terrifying me long legs And I think there are more enemies on the screen in this than are in the Megadrave

in places It's a relentless onslaught but it's an impressive effort I guess you'd call it I mean then if you would call it bootleg in the same way that something like Super Donkey Kong 94 or whatever would be. Is there a story behind this one? I mean, it just seems so

because it's a, say, an ES game, it's not like a PCA, it's not a DOS thing, it's not, it's just an ES game. Yeah, I mean, at the time, like, this was an unlicensed port, I think, made by a Hummer team, I think they're in, are they in Taiwan or... I think so, yeah, yeah, very, very

prolific, um, like, bootlegging team. Yeah, yeah, official. So it does have that bootleg, sort of DNA, then it's not like, air quotes, fan game in the same way as... No, how much it released lots of homebrew stuff that, you know, was very much inspired by other things. I think there's an episode in bootlegs, to be honest. There's at least one episode in bootlegs. I sort of bring it up as, mainly because, like, at the time, like, the people who are trying to make fan games or any sort of games at the time, they didn't have, you know, they weren't working on PC. They were just making stuff for whatever they could actually try to sell.

and part of that would be the NES in Taiwan in like 94 where you could they had enough energy to make lots of weird knock off games and stuff like that and someone decided to try to port Sonic 1 to the to the NES which is already a pretty wild feat to try to do that at all

I think it's interesting that if you've gone to all the effort of recreating Sonic 1 that you'd then not try and recreate Sonic you'd just put Mario in there I mean I sort of get it but like if you're already doing that then maybe it's plausible deniability I don't know it just seems very kind of like no it's not a ripple of Sonic C

there he is very In fact there are actually there's like lots of different versions of this game and there is ones which actually have Sonic in it instead of Samari and they like mix up the levels

like sometimes the levels are in a completely different order and stuff like that but they just did like I guess iterations of this at some point but Sumari is definitely the more iconic one of why is Mario in this Sonic game? and this is something they were pressed to a cartridge

and they would sell which is again difficult to justify it as a fan game as such but at the same time I guess the whole point of putting in Mario as the face of the game is because well that's more recognisable to that audience right if you're releasing on the NES I applaud their enterprising nature I think

the plucky bootleggers But, um, that's not all the very early stuff. But, um, that's some of the very early stuff. But then, uh, where do we go from here? Like, when did the scene kind of kick off? Yeah. So, I mean, let's all travel back to the early, to the late 90s, where the internet, we had our AOL, AOL discs that gave us 100 hours of internet. I was in Australia, so I had AOL. I did actually have AOL disc, but it was called AOL Australia, which is weird. America online Australia. I think they just change the A from America to Australia. That's, that's what I'm saying. I just don't understand. That's why I don't understand. But once I was able to get online at the time, like, there were some Sonic sites that were around at the time. There was Sunit's Sonic Zone. That was a prominent one at the time, which would have information about, like, Sonic Games and stuff like that.

There was Sonic HQ. There was the Sonic Foundation. A lot of these were websites that would, like, post have artwork that people would send in, information about the games. games. This is a time where people were still confused as to what Tails Sky Patrol was because it never came out in America. And the only proof that it existed was going through the Sonic Jam Museum. And there was one image there going, oh, that's weird. What the hell is that? And part of this at the time when I went on the internet was that they would have a fan game section. And they would have like maybe three, you know, two or three games on

there that were the prominent ones at the time. And, you know, going through web rings, as we all did in 1997, I turned, I popped up to a website called Danny's Sonic Fan Created Games. This was a website made by Danny Russell, who has actually been on the podcast before. He used to work at Sega and on the Sega Forever stuff. And so there was an episode of that. he ran this website and that was

had quite a few little games on there and it was really cool at the time and then in my correction is it suddenly disappeared it just went offline whatever no way to really particularly contact with it and I was really sad about it and so it probably only went away

for like a month it did come back but at the time I was you know yeah again 13 14 and it's like I'm going to create a Sonic fan game website Sonic HQ exists, I'm going to make Sonic Fan Games HQ and that's going to be how this works. I originally started this website on, there was a hosting service called Zoom.com, X-O-O-O-M.

It was one of those, you know, similar to Fortune City or like all those sorts of ones where it's like you have five megabytes to put stuff on. Oh, yeah. And puts all that, put a bunch of games on there. staffed that sort of stuff up, but also around the same time, one of the prominent Sonic websites was the Sonic Stuff Research Group. This was on EmulationZone.org. This was started by Andy Wollon, and he owned Emulation Zone. And so it was a website that had lots of stuff about prototypes for Sonic stuff.

That was really interesting for everyone. So that had the secrets of Sonic the Hedgehog. Area 51 by Jan Abaza. It had the Sonic Hacking Guide, lots of, like, different little websites that were sort of trying to go through screenshots of the game from magazines or maybe hacking to find where hidden palace zone is and all this sort of secret stuff. And so I sent him an email, I sent Andy Wallen an email, and I spoke to him recently, and he still has all these emails that he had.

So I will now tell you, I'll now speak this email to you. And this is how Sonic Fan Cage HQ starts. Okay, I have a site up on Zoom, but Zoom sucks rather bad, and I like all your ways of emulation. My site is completely based on all capital letters, Sonic Fan Games, five exclamation marks. There are so many of hem, in not them, that I made a site of them, smiley face. Pulled it back at the end with that second then. Hold on.

Yep, exactly. I really want to be par of emulation zone as many of your people make fan games and to put them all on one site is a great idea. How about it? Outstanding stuff. Fuller spelling mistakes, it's just awful. That's how they pulled it.

I honestly think that how about it is what sealed the deal. Yep, exactly. It's honestly such a perfect encapsulation of, like, Sonic fans, like, communicating in the early days. I remember when I first started my Sonic fan fan site, like, back before Sega Driven. It was me just emailing other fan site owners and having conversations and being an annoying teenager. But, yeah, it's how we communicated, right? It's almost identical to the email I sent Jeremy Parrish when I wanted to do Redmond's in 2018. just cold emailing everyone yeah absolutely and so yeah somehow i convinced him to give me some space

on his on his website and the website was pretty much at the time had unlimited space in comparison at the time so i was able to start this uh this setup and it really kind of blew up we had like a pro board and then an easy board there was like huge amounts of things At the time, I think just based off of links, it was like one of the top five Sonic websites on the internet at the time. You know, people would email me their games and then I'd have to download them onto 56K modems and then upload them and then upload them to the site directly and, you know, not exactly having like a pHP or anything. I had to just really just edit the HTML directly to just add a game and just everything in that. sort of regard and how are these early games being made exactly like what was the software behind me so they would be a lot of these games were made through a software called click and play

and so click and play was made by click team which is still around today it was this really simple software that allowed kids to make games it was it's a one where you can plop a sprite on the thing, and plop a background, like a platform, and you can go, if Sprite hits platform, then stop. Yeah, I have to confess at this point. I also did use this, and in fact, it occurs to me that I did, in fact, make what could technically be called a Sonic fan game with it. So even I'm part of the history.

I'm wasn't into the very fabric. No, I've still got it. You can have it if you want. It's really shit, though. Hey, look, I mean, look, not many of these games were actually that good. at the time but for a 13 year old to make a game that's solid and that's you know some of the best part of that i love click and play it was very if i had it if i could still get it working i'd probably still be using it now it was very just like yeah the logic was so simple to implement

that it just took all of the pain out of it it was faster fantastic pieces of software yeah so click and play and that the the thing really with click and play is that you could only make uh single screen games uh so you couldn't it didn't have any scrolling or anything like that. But then that then evolved into the sequel program that they make called Click and Create or the Games Factory, which I think is what it. They had different names depending on which country you're in. And then that then merged into Multimedia Fusion and Multimedia Fusion too. And now, even now, you can get like Click Team Fusion on Steam and people are still making games with that today. And the fun thing is that you can actually like load in Click

and play files and it will actually load it up into the more modern platform. There's still, there's a lot of little bugs and stuff that don't necessarily work because the computer's not made in Windows 95 anymore, but you can still actually load up some of these games in that. It's surprising how well older sort of click and play and games factory stuff still runs on modern Windows. Yeah, I'm pretty sure mine still runs. I'm going to have to check it live.

Yeah, because an awful lot of 16 bits of. software just doesn't run on, you know, modern windows without having to force it through some other piece of software. And a lot of these fan games, just because of the windowed nature of them, I think, just to still natively run through that. It's pretty crazy. Yeah. A lot of timing issues, I think. Yeah, I know, for sure. And MIDI files are just very different.

Yeah. They're obviously using some default sound font now for middies, but yeah, it's one of those things, isn't it? But, yeah, I remember discovering something fan games, HQ, and just being enamored with it, trying to download things. on a 56k modem. I remember it would always be a bit of a crapshoot if you tried to download anything above 3 megabytes, whether we're going to like download fully.

Absolutely. I just want to reveal live that it does in fact work. It works perfectly. It just immediately started playing as a pulling MIDI of when the Saints go marching in that I chose to use on level one. So yeah, I'm pretty pleased with that. I'm never going to upload it because it turns out that

it's about one on my exes, so it can't be happening. Oh, it's nothing but praising, but nonetheless, the pain cuts too deep. But yeah, like Sonic Fan Game H.Q would have full games, it would have demos. It had a section for furry games, which at the time Furry just made. a fun cartoon character that you just made at the time. This is a very different era where, you know, we were told not to put our actual real names online. You know, it was like, don't use your real name.

This is a prior to Facebook and stuff. So you pretty much had a couple of different options. You could either make a South Park character that kind of looked like you and use that or as a South Park wrestler character of some sort. or you would make a sprite edit of a sonic character and just use that as your avatar online. Yeah, the sort of spriting scene has to be hand in hand with this and the comics.

Absolutely. Oh, big time, big time. Yeah. There was a huge... I'm trying to remember the major, the name of the page that had a load of sprite sheets on. There was, it was size, like psycho or size something. Okay.

I think, I feel, I'm not exactly 100%. but I feel like Sprite's resource sort of started from that. Big time. Big time. Yeah, that's the one. And then sort of expanded out on that. And so Sonic Fan Game HQ had a huge Sprite section as well and background sections. But the main difference really between the two was that people would make sprites and backgrounds that were in Click Team files already. So rather than just be a Sprite sheet where you then had to like rip it out and put them into everything,

someone would make, for example, and most prominently, like an Angel Island Zone pack and that just has a bunch of like blocks from Angel Island Zone from Sonic 3 and Knuckles and therefore probably a good 50% of the games just use that as the first level as part of that aspect.

But then people would make edits of, like, I'm going to make my own badnicks. That's just a badnik pack. Here you go. I've done some fun. It's a mixture of the buzz bomber around a crab meat together. And they would just send that to me

and I'd upload that for that. And then people could use all this stuff to then make their own fan games as they wished. So it's a very sort of share and share or like maybe like, you know, credit the original like, like, if a Sprite at these, but feel free to use them. It's like the Wild West.

I love it. Yeah. Some people were just like, hey, I'm just an artist. I don't really want to make the game, but I love making these Sprite edits and stuff like that. And yeah, so it was all a pretty good time. I mean, there were some flame wars, and there was some, you know, flame wars between Danny and Solopan game HQ.

But that's all good. I don't really remember half of that anymore. To be honest. Water under the bridge. Water under the bridge. I've worked with Danny directly in the last five years. So this has been, so we're on good terms. I just had a chat with him last week.

But yeah, do you want to talk about Clickopia? Yes, absolutely. Yeah. So this was a. another one that's been kicking around for an absolute god knows how long now it's still live a big resource for anything made in click and play in games factory that sort of early early stuff not just sonic fan games but there is a dedicated sonic fan game section on there it mirrors an awful lot of stuff that was already on sonic fan games HQ if i remember correctly

but it it seems to still get updates i don't know who is running but it's it's nice that there's still some stuff being added to it and it's a nice little archive of for for older sonic fan games from, you know, late 90s, early 2000s. Scaly Foxy is another more modern, recent development. A really, really cool resource for older Sonic fan games. They've really dug deep and found an awful lot of what's kicking around demos. I hadn't seen archived anywhere else, not even on Archive.org, which is also a great resource for

non-time games. But yeah, Skaly Foxy is, I mean, it's a very amateurish-looking website, don't get me wrong, but like it's lovely that there is a place where there is just an enormous list of archived Sonic fan games on there that you can browse. And yeah, it's just nice that someone is doing that work because, I mean, as we've discussed, you know, the history of fan games now is just so long in the tooth. You can look back at these older games

and class them as retro games now because they're just, yeah, they've been kicking around for so long. And some of these earliest games have been, I mean, as well as, not that I want to get ahead of us, there must have been in flash games as well. There was. There is, the thing with the flash game, though, is that I will talk about it when we get to the games list. There is one in particular that really stands out, and that came a little bit later than what is being developed at this point.

And it's quite heavily momentum-based, which is not the case for an awful lot of these Click Team and Games Factory games. They're very sort of, yeah, they don't have the momentum and physics-based. gameplay that you'd expect from a Sonic game. They're very sort of like place blocks on screen, interact with block, because the engine doesn't know how to interpret surfaces as ceilings or floors. If you jump into a ceiling, you get stuck to it, you know, that sort of thing. It's, it, it, the development of fan games from this point is very much a case of chasing that more accurate feel of a Sonic game, whereas at the moment, yeah, late 90s, early 2000s,

it was very much a case of, right, well, we've got this bit of software. It sort of works. So what can we do? Let's just force through what we can make sort of thing. Yeah, exactly. And, obviously, inspired by that sort of dead period, where it was, like you say, between Sonic 3D glass and Sonic Adventure. But then things really sort of take off with Sonic Adventure,

and then all the 2D Sonic fan games start to be inspired by Sonic Adventure, and that seems to inspire a new wave of interest in making Sonic fan games as well. It's a really interesting time. yeah uh sprite wise like it was all like okay i'm going to make a sonic adventure version of i'm gonna make a sonic sprite oh yeah oh yeah that uses uh sonic three sprite but now he's got green eyes and he has like new shoes yeah and all that sort of stuff it just became oh yeah and um everything like that Thank you. So, so what were the son of the big games?

from this sort of period? What were people talking about what were people playing? So what I'll talk about is what we define as like the first Sonic fan game that was online first.

These were those games that would have been on Sonic HQ and Sonic Zone. But the first one that we know of was a game called Sonic Boom. This was a game

in 1995 by Martin Braide in Click and Play. It was a, it's a three-minute game. At the time, you know, there was no sprites available.

so he just drew all this Sonic thing. It is a game where Sonic and Tails run from left to right and there are bees after him just using the click and play bee and you have to throw tomatoes the other way to kill all the bees. And if you die, there's a quick animated cutscene of Sonic standing next to a wall and then tails in the tornado smashing into him and killing. and if you do get past that you fight metal Sonic and then that's the end of the game

it goes yeah you won but this is the first sort of Sonic fan game that was made in Click and Play and available online and yeah it was it's just like it's a weird little thing but it's kind of funny and it's been made sort of future proof

like you can play it again in another game called Sonic Robo Blast from the past which is sort of like updated it to at least like run on a more modern machine. In widescreen, no less. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. So that's like, that was sort of the first one. The next sort of big one, I would say, is Tales and the Quest for a hundred rings.

This was a game in 1997, 98 by Magnus Anderson. It's actually kind of neat where, again, he had to draw all the sprites himself. it's sort of set up in, he's inspired by the Sonic Saturday Morning cartoon. So it's Tales and it's got like the sort of Satam Robotnik and Sally and all those characters. Yeah, it's got a sort of multi-genre thing going on as well. Yeah, it's quite, yeah. It's quite like, you know, they put a lot of effort into this, which is actually quite cool. And, you know, you can play it.

It probably takes about 15 minutes to actually finish. But it's kind of brutally hard. you're going to need to use the passwords and everything to get through it. But it's a game where, yeah, the first level, I think it's like your tails, you sort of walk up and down. You have to collect, basically, you have to collect 100 rings total. There are 100 rings in the level in the game. There's maybe like 10, 15 in each level.

You have to avoid the robots or kill the robots and collect them all without dying. And the first level, you're sort of running around, jumping up and down. second level I think you're in a submarine and there's like a boss fight with Robotnik where he just kind of bounces around the screen like the screensaver and you just got a blast him

it's all very impressive honestly it's it's got a lot of charmed of the visuals because I'm not going to say it's badly drawn because that's that would be intellectually dishonest but it's got it's very effectively drawn and it's quite charming and cartoonish and

just generally nice but there's been effort put into the aesthetic here as best as you can within click and play I would say so yeah my full marks from me for this one it looks good I'd play this now

I find this stuff really really charming for sure like it's like you say it's very amateurish but like at the same time it's got a real nostalgia like for this era it's clearly you know they're just using MS paint

or something to create these things but yeah it must have taken absolutely ages though like some of them even got like little sort of animation and everything just seems to work really well. It's really impressive for click and play. I say they've used MSPake. They couldn't have because they've used transparencies to create the sprites and things like that,

so it must have been something else. But, yeah, it's still, it's impressive for the time for sure. They probably drew it all in actual click and play, and, like, that's hard. Oh, I see, I've never used click and play, so I didn't realize it had that sort of interface. It has, like, you edit your scripts into it, yeah. Yeah, I've forgotten about that. Good Lord. I was too lazy.

I just imported images into it. One other earlier one was Sonic Pinball Mania by Damien Grove, aka Sexman. So Sexman was a guy who, the Sexman. Right. He was the first person to create the Sonic hacking guide. So he was sort of the first guy to actually figure out how to start hacking some of these Sonic games and find, like, Hidden Palace Zone in, like, the original Sonic 2 and all this sort of stuff. But he did start with Sonic Pinball Mania.

And, look, it's not great. It's basically just, like, a vague pinball thing, and Sonic just bounces around, but you can't really actually hit him. It doesn't have any, like, you know, physics or anything like that. But this is just one of those games that was just online at the time. It's interesting how much of the kind of DNA, like the blood of these games, did sort of go on within the franchise, within the fandom as well. Like, it's not just, oh, this is a sort of not great pinball game made by, you know, some guy.

It's someone who was instrumental in like the initial hacking efforts of these. I just find that fascinating how all these, and a lot of these people just are still around. It never leaves you. Yeah. I did a catch-up with a lot of these guys in real life. Now I'm actually living in the US, two years. years ago. And yeah, I met with him in person and that was really cool and he's

been working. He's he actually was working on, not to spoil it for later, but like Sonic Roboblast 2 was ported to the 32X more recently and he and A.J. Freda were making that themselves.

So that's pretty wild to try to do in 2024. We will definitely get to that one because that's one of the big, big ones. But before Robo Blast 2, there needs to be Robo Blast so yeah

what's up with that one So this one This one is I would consider like the longest game at the time This was made in 1998 by a guy

called Johnny Walbank It is a screen by screen game where you have a sort of drawn little Sonic with he sort of jumps

and has very wonky physics But it's somehow this game it just inspired so many people to make their own pan game considering the tools that are being worked with this is remarkable

how much how can we recapture this using what we've got it's hard to imagine it being done better in click and play yeah I mean at the time if anything like the main issue really is like the way that his jump is

he sort of rotated the jump for each like you know each time but it just sort of it's in the wrong corner it's not like put in the middle where it is so it just sort of goes well I see what you mean all around it's not centred the sprite

I get yeah exactly but at the time like when you opened up this app the app's like 1.5 megabytes so it's huge that's going to take you four hours to download in that game at the start it had like the Sonic Satam opening music in the app as well

and probably that's probably like he put a, you know, put a microphone up to the TV or something like that and probably recorded that. And then during, had like little cutscenes and those cutscenes had the music from the Sonic anime, the Sonic OBA, which he probably recorded from the Sonic Jam disc that had like a little demo of that on there or something like that. Yeah, it was a little trailer, wasn't it? Yeah, I remember now.

A little trailer. But like this game, you know, it takes, you know, I mean, it's 20, probably 20, 30 minutes to get through, but it has bosses that are unique. It's got like all these different worlds to it. And yeah, it inspired like a whole bunch of people to sort of make more games at this time. And

Johnny now, you know, he is a game designer at Mediatonic. So if you've played Fall Guys, then you've played the latest in the Sonic Roboblast games, I guess. Yeah. I mean, I was just surprised because I mean, I'm familiar with RoboBloss too to some extent,

but to see that it came from this is just kind of remarkable. I mean, there's some stuff in common. I think that some of the bad nicks come up in 3D. But other than that, it's just such an advancement that it's just kind of wild. Yeah. It's really smart use of limitations as well. Like, in that the stages very much look exactly the same. It's just that they've changed the colour of the tiles.

Yeah. I mean, this is quite a small thing that impressed me, but I was really impressed that they got the hit flash in with the bosses. That must have been quite a pain for the tier. Like, little things like that. Now, being vaguely familiar with the program, you can just see that amount of, I don't

know, it's like with stuff like code, I don't understand it at all, so it's hard for me to be impressed by it, but when I know the tools they're using, it's like, wow, geez, that's amazing. Like, the amount of time that must have been spent on this and how advanced it was compared to pretty much everything

else. I don't know. It's impressive to me. Very impressive. is it? Definitely. So this started, like, this spurred on lots more Sonic fan games to come out. And once Sonic Fan Games, H.Q was around, then there was a place that people could go to and then start making these new games and then be inspired by this sort of stuff. So one of the games that I remember fondly is a game called Sonic the Search for Knuckles, which is a sort of a parody, it's a parody, like another five-minute game, but like it's a parody of The Search for Spock, Star Trek. movie but it's got like you sort of start it up a little spot comes up says live long and prosper you just sort of go through some levels it's got like a weird uh the end kind of ends in

like a titanic parody yes where the the floating island is about to fall into the ocean and then like sonic and knuckles are having like an intimate moment as they're about to about to die or something like that. It reminded me of, sorry, I don't mean to talk, it reminded me of, again, the crossover between things like these games and like Sonic Sprite comics with the humor and the... Definitely. That would put these characters into a situation that's unusual.

There was quite a lot of mileage in that. Not so much now that it's been rinsed, but back then, it was just, yeah, the sheer level of creativity. And I love stuff like this, where it's just, it's really, it just seems very much like throw it in what would be funny just do it all

I love that that's just great to see absolutely and yeah there was another one very similar to this which I'm just remembering right now it was called

When Tales gets bored oh yes I remember when Tales oh that rings a bell yeah this was a game by I think Sonic Vegemite so it was an Australian

yeah they used to do hoaxes that's their whole thing wasn't it like Explained it's of screenshots of games and stuff, yeah. Yeah. But it was about having all these cut scenes about like Sonic talking to Tales, Taylor says, I'm bored, and so I'm going to do things to you. And part of that would be like a level where it's all dark.

He's just turned the lights out. And so now you've got to go through this level and try to get through it in that way. So there was all this like silly stuff. And like, yes, Sprite comics were definitely like the pretty prominent during that time as well. definitely. Yeah, there are really things were really like, should I mean,

I'll mention it, but I'm not mentioning it out of approval. But things like, things like that's my Sonic. And I mean, even like Tyson Hess is early stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It just makes me think of things like that.

Is it how you pronounce it? I don't know. Yeah, I think that's how you pronounce it. Okay, good. Yeah, because, I mean, you can't really get much higher than he got really in terms of the fandom. And it fascinates me as someone who was there

sort of at the beginning reading Sonic R and just laughing. It's crazy to think how far he got. Yeah. Somehow going from arms, the Kitsunei to like being an executive producer for the Sonic films. Yeah. Tales in the Mega Man X right armor swearing. Two nipples the enchilada.

Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. Sonic won't leave these people behind. It's very good for them, you know. I see. Yeah. I noticed you mentioned one called Sonic Adventure Guideon on here. Yes.

And I had an absolute prosely and rush when I saw it because of the Mughal Cavern, which I've mentioned on here before, but I was hanging around on there. And that was a weird place in a good way. Like, just a really funny, inventive, kind of supportive place that was. Yeah. I don't remember this. I think it was slightly before my time, but it was just like the name, Gulock, the pair. You know, I was like, oh, yeah, that kind.

I remember Kulok, yeah. That's just kind of wild to see. Again, like Kulok, so Kulok had the Mughal Cavern. His sprite was like an edit of a Tailed Sprite to look like a Mughal from Final Fantasy. And basically, I mean, at the time, I think it was like a, the Mughal Cavern I would define as was a, a lot of people from Solid Fan Games Hs who were showing up on there. And it was kind of like the place where, like, if everyone else is fighting, this is like no one's fighting really here. It's like this is the, you know, sort of, so, yeah, a space where, like, everyone can just be calm or just make, make silly stories and stuff like that.

Yeah, I just, I remember going on there and write, I mean, just saying I found, like, a Sonic 1 prototype than no one's ever seen before, and it was just MS paint drawings I'd done of just, just awful shit, like, just the worst things ever. And everyone just being fully like, oh, this is amazing, wow, I can't believe it, you, like, everyone just immediately gets it and jumps on that, and I missed, I kind of miss that vibe, you know. Sorry, it's just nice to be reminded of these things. I don't know. I think there's a lot of material. I don't see material. That makes me sound so commercial.

But I think there's a lot in these communities that's worth talking about and preserving. And hopefully this episode will help with some of that. But yeah, sorry, I got sidetracked by the movie cavern, my usual. Like when I was at school, yeah. So Kuluk made this thing called Sonic Adventure Gayden. Guy Dan? Yeah, that's one.

It was basically a parody game where, it was 15 megabytes which meant that for a lot of people 15 megabytes was like a day to like try to download off a 56k modem yeah there was no way I was downloading this in 2001 and tell you that yeah absolutely absolutely but all it was was like a small cut scene that had it was 15 minx because he put all the all this music in it I think and like voices and stuff like that but it was basically just a quick cut scene with sonic and robotic and then it goes to be continued or something like that and people were pissed so it's like a prank it's like a gag yeah absolutely they were like hey I've made a brand new game and it's like whoa this must be you know five hours long there's like a second of gameplay

if you if you just immediately run over and and bot robotic but what what fascinates me is that the effort has been put in to fully anime like look up and down everything is there it's all been implemented just for the sake of this silly joke which I love

Yeah, like just enough that like the screenshot on Sonic Fan Games Hedged Tube looks like it's a game of some sort and then actually like, no, that is actually the whole game. It's just that one screenshot, basically. It's fantastic. The credits are longer than the game, like significantly. Yeah, that I think that's, yeah, that is correct. It just goes like that. Some other ones that mentioned, there was a whole Sonic Chaos series.

This was made by Atec AXU and Danny Russell actually sort of worked with that as well. But these were all, like, pretty solid games. There was Sonic Chaos, Sonic Chaos strikes again. Atank was prolific. God, he was really early days. I remember these a lot. I was super into K-O-Megra and Sonic Unity in particular. Those were very cool.

Sonic Unity, I remember having like a color slider so that you could edit the Sonic character sprite so that you could be whatever color you want, very, very sort of early OC kind of builder kind of thing going on there, which is, again, strangely. prophetic considering sonic forces but yeah

no I distinctly remember all the Sonic Chaos games and Sonic Chaos Revolution and stuff like that they're very very prolific developer yeah and I think some of them

might actually still be a bit lost I'm not exactly sure and that's where yeah I think that's where Scaly Foxy I think because he's been talking to me a bit as well and like trying to figure out

exactly where some of these like different versions of stuff Scaly Foxy's been their website is also like trying to go like okay what actually was at Sage in 2004 because there's really nothing that's out there that's actually written about what existed there or what the demos were

and so trying to see if people still have some of this stuff on like a backed up CD somewhere it's sort of part of all that I had a bloody terrible sonic demo at one of the sages in 2005 oh god yeah that's been lost the test of the time.

This makes me want to... Yeah, go on, sorry. So it's built with a similar sort of thing. I was downloading, like, engines from Sonic Fan Games HQ and, like, tile sets and things like that and just sort of dumping it in there and using what other people have contributed to the website. So, yeah, it just goes to show you, like,

how integral that community was to making stuff. Just... The preservation effort, I mean, it makes me want to just, like, go back and dig through all my CDs just in case, you know? Oh, tell me about it. Yeah, I should really make it some time to do. that sometime. It's just

I could have stuff that is like integral to this that I don't even know I've got. There's stuff I've covered on the Segretem and YouTube channel that is now lost. I can't find it. My video is the only existence of this game that was available on the fan games forums at one point

and has now been deleted figures, you know, they upgraded from ProBords or something, you know? It's just one of those things. If I may, I was very impressed looking at this list, because there's a few of these games that I knew, but the game Sonic Epoch fascinates me. I was astonished by it.

Like, that's crazy. I only ever knew it from the GBA port, but Ryan, like, tell us about this DOS version, because I didn't know about this. Yeah. Like, so this game, this guy, at the time, Jomo 25 or Robert S, this, he sent this game to me and I was just blown away. Because this is a guy who made a game in DOS that looks very similar to sort of a, to Sonic, it's all set in like a Sonic Saturday morning cartoon. They used sprites, they made sprites that were sort of like taking screenshots of the show and sort of editing it in a way.

Yeah, that's what I mean. fascinated me the way that, because that's what jumped out of me. It was like, this has been I mean, not scanned, surely, but this has been taken directly. They also been basically freeze-framing the show and... Digitizing it, yeah, yeah. That's so interesting.

It could be like they downloaded it on... They probably got it on... Like, the real media files were probably available somewhere online. Yeah, yeah. And all that really squished and stuff like that. But, I mean, at the time when he sent it to me and I was like amazed by it,

because, like, oh, this is a guy who can actually program. This isn't just some click-and-play a game. This is a game that someone made. And part of it as well was that in this game, so it's called Sonic Epoch. I think it might be called Sonic Epic. I think technically, Epoch is actually a different, weird way to say epic,

which I only learned when I was actually doing this export. But the game had all this sort of, uniqueness, like unique art to it, but also like it went into, oh, Sonic goes into the bad future of the time. Tails has grown up and he swears. That's cool.

I can't believe Tails said fuck. And it's got blood in it and like all this sort of stuff. And so really like, this sort of blew up and particularly in the community it really blew up as well because there was another website that was really popular at the time.

called Sonic Pandemonium. I vaguely remember that as well. The Pandemoneum was, the person running that site was a woman, a woman called Sonic, S-O-N-I-Q-U-E, and they were, it's all about, they loved Satam. Yeah. And part of this was like getting really into Sonic Epic. And at a time, I think, both Robert and her actually were in a relationship for a little while. So it sort of, it sort of, you know, blew up sort of in.

this community and became kind of crazy um and then like eventually like rather than like doing that he went even crazier than a dos game and then developed a game boy advance game uh just a on it on his own let's made the port of the game to the gba and that's the final version that actually got finished that's wild i can't believe that i i didn't even know anything about this until like i saw this on here and yeah compared to something not that i'm dismissed. Not that I'm criticising anyone using Click and Play, obviously, but this is like so much more, this is such a step up

from that in terms of complexity and it was wild. It's got to be one of the earliest Homebrew GBA games, I think I've ever experienced for sure. Definitely. And it's actually a much friendlier way to play the game. They've scaled the sprites down a little bit

so you can see more of what's happening on the screen. It's so massive in the Dobs version. Yeah, it's yeah, no, just a really impressive little development. Again, stylistically, it might not be your cup of tea, but it's just impressive to see what people could create

at this point. And I mean, like GBA emulation in the early 2000s, like, I mean, Visual Boy Advance is still kind of like the go-to emulator if I remember correctly. But like, to have any sort of homebrew

development tools for the GBA at that point, like when it's basically still in active use, it was pretty wild like yeah the GBA emulation I remember was crazy I think I've talked about it before

but like I remember a friend of mine having like Super Mario advance running on his PC full speed pretty much full speed and it wasn't even out yet like it was just like we the GBA must have been

absolutely demolish by emulation I can't even I remember a time when yeah it was literally a case of like this game's just come out it's already online like it's yeah I mean you know

I was, I mean, I'm not going to pretend I wasn't, and I was playing, like, all the Sonic Advance games before they came out, you know, when they were driving, I mean, Sonic Advance 3 dropped so early, it got leaked or something, and I was just like, there's no way this is the real game, it's too weird, you know, but no, sorry, that's a side track, it's a sidetrack, I apologize. But again, hugely influential on the fan game scene, like, uh, the moment those Sonic advanced games were out there, like the, the Sprite sheets were ripped, they were in everything in the early 2000s.

Oh, God, they were so expressive, they just changed, I mean, there's how they changed Sprite comics forever. Absolutely. It's so good. It's so good. Why, Sonic, Sega, release those fucking games, God damn it.

Yeah. What the hell? Japanese Wii U and that's it. Are you kidding me? Yeah. Those games are so brilliant and they won't re-release them.

It sucks. Yeah. I feel like there must be like some weird thing with THQ was the publisher or something. And whatever contract that is is like miserably like,

no, only THQ can release this or something along those lines. But I don't know. It's a shame. They should figure that out. Like, it shouldn't be too complicated. It is a real shame that they're not available in, like, a collection, because I would be all over that, for real.

I'd love... I mean, Advance 2 is one of my favourite ever Sonic games, like, period. I would love to have that on. It's so influential. I mean, in particular... I suppose we could just talk about it. Ultimate Flash Sonic in 2004. This was the one.

This was the Flash developed Sonic game that kind of changed the... Yeah, I used to play this at school. Yeah, I remember... Thanks to my better half for reminding me to... put this on here. But yeah, created in 2004 developed by Dennis Gid. Like, just extremely impressive. The whole thing is momentum-based.

Everything is ripped from Sonic Advance 2. It creates the... It recreates like Leaf Storm and... No, Leaf Forest, is it, the first stage? Yeah. And the I.C. stage is in there as well. Released on New Grounds and you can't tell me, if you weren't

online during this time, you hadn't played a little Flash on that game. Oh, well, yeah. This... Yeah, I remember because on the computers I was using at school it ran in slow motion it was still awesome because it was like it was like you know it's air quotes it's a proper

sonic game you can just play in your browser like really really impressive stuff but one thing I want to note that's also on here because it's one of the ones I did play is Sonic Time Attacked because this was a big one this was like really hyped yeah I added Sonic the Fast Revelation on here as well because you can't really discuss Time Attack without that because Sonic Fast Revelation yeah Sonic Fast Revelation is

Jamie Bailey the developer of Sonic Time Attack's first game, and he developed that thing in Click and Play, and it is wild that it runs the way it does, because, like you were saying, click and play is kind of screen by screen. There is scrolling in Sonic the Fast Revelation. How on Earth he did this, I have no idea. It's really, like, difficult to play. Like, the momentum and physics are just off out of the blast.

It's really difficult to play. But visually, very, very interesting. He always did these sprites edits, made everything sort of pillow-shaded. They look very Amiga-esque. and yeah it was a really impressive game a complete game as well released in 2003 to click and play and probably one of the most

impressive things I think I've ever you know seen come out of click and play in particular is it that whenever you move or jump that it's moving the border round rather than Sonic is that it may well be what he's doing yeah yeah it's very the whole world is working but yeah obviously he did try to develop a sequel

which was going to be sort of top down isometric kind of thing there is a demo that kicking around which I'm pretty sure I downloaded from Sonic Fan Games HQ back in the day but it led into the development of Sonic Time attacked and this was like I think like a real watershed moment in the community because like it feels

even though it's not using accurate momentum in physics it still includes things like loops and you can actually go around them and it doesn't like bug out and glitch around because it doesn't know how to collide and slopes. Even like the master system Sonic 2 couldn't do that

right. Yeah. And that's made by saying, I have to say, you mentioned it in the notes, but Sonic Time Attacked, I remember just loving the rail grinding in that. It's better than any of the rail grinding in any of the other Sonic games is official. It still feels great. It still feels excellent. Yeah, you press control in the air and Sonic sort of like magnetizes almost to the rails.

This isn't something you can play today as easily, is it? Or am I being wrong here? It still works fine. Does it really? Yeah, yeah. Was this fusion? Was this, but like, we moved on fusion by the phone. This would have been Games Factory, I think.

Oh, really? Okay, wow. So still pretty early, but this is really the first one that's like, oh, this actually plays well and is good in a way. And so this sort of inspired and people to actually go, oh, maybe I could make a really, an actual fun Sonic game in some way and started the burn of like, okay, I need to try to actually like, how do I make an actual Sonic game run in Click and Play in a way that is meant to make this sort of stuff work?

and that's where, like, Christian Whitehead and all those guys sort of started and this sort of thing. Absolutely, absolutely. And, yeah, the cutscenes in Sonic Time Attack, again, were animated by a Blazehead Shock of, yeah, what we were talking about earlier as well. He was developing a game called the Sonic the Fated Hour, which had very similar sort of looking cutscenes as well. Very impressive sort of story. Sonic Infinity as well, which was like a Mega Man, Mega Man cross Sonic game that never unfortunately got that far. But it was like inspiring at the time.

important early releases for sure. I added Eggman Hates Furries onto this list just because, again, my other half reminded me that this existed and a strange game in that I think it's a little bit contentious with certain people because it's very story-driven and it does some pretty wild things. But conceptually, incredibly impressive to this day.

It is kind of a boss rush game, so you don't really have levels as such. you're basically following a story and it's interspersed with these, like, really, really inventive and creative boss battles that just evolve and change as it's going on. I played it back in the day, I briefly. I don't think I got that far because it's quite hard, but I looked at the video, and I just thought to myself, this looks like something that treasure would have made in places. Oh, it's got that style with the bosses, for sure. The shifting, like, Maccas and, like, the stage where you're, like, running around the sort of orbit of this giant sort of sphere of death,

as all of the weapons come out of it and try and kill you. It's really remarkable, and I assume by the title that this is the point where, and this is not reflect my own opinions, I just want to make that clear. This is where the tide has turned against the furry community to some extent, or at least the perception, the perception has changed in the public eye. Yeah, I'm not entirely sure what the interpretation is, because it ends with a moment that you would, I would say would be more celebratory of the furry community than actually criticizing it. But, yeah, it's a strange one for sure. It goes to some absolutely wild places as you play this game. But yeah, one of those games I just wanted to mention just because I think it's a really, really creative game

that does an awful lot with boss battles that I'm not sure I've seen in any other Sonic fan game, to be honest with you. I think it really takes them to some wild places and does some really inventive and creative things. Yeah, and it implements this sort of like wall-running mechanic as well, which I don't think I've ever seen anybody else try. Basically, if you run towards a wall and jump just before it, you will sort of stick to the wall and then run up it.

And you can use that momentum to sort of spring backwards and forwards off walls. And it just creates some interesting stage design. But yeah, no, really, really cool game. And definitely worth checking out. But just be prepared for some, you know, unique fan involvement with the Sonic community there. It definitely goes to some wild places. We're going to be able to be, but,

back, but, uh, Cool Cool stuff. Should we move on to Sonic Time Twisted? Absolutely. I remember this one as well. This was another big one. This was in development for absolutely

ages and went through so many different engines and formats. I think it ended in the Sonic Dash engine but was originally developed within, you know, Games Factory and multimedia fusion. But yeah, developed by Overbound from 2005

and then finally released in 2017. Oh, Game Maker, sorry, it was finished in, sorry. Yes, I do apologize. no one of the most impressive developments in Sonic fan gaming very much a sort of fan sequel to Sonic CD you have the time travelling mechanic in it had some incredible shields

it's kind of mania before mania a little bit from visually I would say yeah definitely yeah no again one of those games that I followed the development of very closely and was always impressive whenever it showed up and one of those things when you when a game is in the development that long

you just don't think it's ever going to happen and just lovely to see that it finally did and overbound's a lovely person I've had, you know, dealings with him in the past and he's always been very friendly and just wanted to make a great game and, yeah, like, just some of the most creative stuff I've ever seen

in the Snipes Van Gogh. I think one of the bosses is robotic as galactus. Just wild as all hell. Yeah, no, really fun, really fun game. Is this using like an established engine that the community uses or was it just its own... So someone had developed the Sonic Dash

engine as like a plug-in for Game Maker and it's got very sort of accurate sort of sonic momentum and physics which allows it to feel the way it does and as a result it turns into just one of these really really impressive step-ups from

the early 2000s when we were sticking to walls and ceilings and things and then all of a sudden we're now interacting with slopes with the correct sort of momentum and physics that you'd expect from a 16-bit Sonic game. But yeah, it was a slow development, but you can still play those early demos and see

it progress from that sort of weird, wonky feeling of those earlier engines to something a lot more 16-bit accurate, and as a result, it still plays great and is a very easy thing to pick up and play if you're into

a 16-bit-star Sonic. So this is... Because the next one's on the list are, they were the ones that I remember everyone talking about. I don't know if... Surely Sonic before the sequel was before Time Twisted or was it actually? Did it actually...

So I think Sonic before the sequel did release before the final version Time Twisted but Time Twisted demos had existed at that point anyway. So yeah, the next four games have all been developed by Lake Feppard. He again is probably one of these other prolific developers like

ATAC we were talking about previously just loved Sonic and just kept making these games and like he didn't really like put them out to the community to demo and test he just kind of made them in isolation and just smashed them out you know like he had a vision and very much just like

okay I want to make a cool intercourse between Sonic 1 and 2 and then like two of the games he made a kind of Metroidvania style games which is before the sequel aftermath and chrono adventure and it's just like yeah I'm just going to make these and they're here and if you don't like them then whatever

but it turns out they're absolutely fantastic. They were made with Sonic Worlds, which is a plug-in for multimedia fusion. Right. And again, very similar sort of 16-bit-style momentum in physics. It feels very, you know, 16-bit accurate. But they're just so creative. Before the sequel and after the sequel

have this sort of lovely flow to them where it feels like you naturally progress through the stages and you're actually exploring a world that everything seems to sort of flow nicely together. Sort of the way you get like those transitions. in Sonic 3 and Knuckles. Yeah. It has that sort of thing, but they feel very thematically relevant to each other.

It doesn't feel like they're just, oh, randomly, here's a lava stage next to the Ice Stage. That doesn't make a lot of sense. But, yeah, it all feels like it flows together, lovely, and it's got these sorts. The bosses are really good, too. Like, yeah, it's got, like, some really iconic, like, cool bosses that is usually the hardest thing to make it, like, a Sonic game is, like, a fun boss in a lot of times. Like, even, like, the more recent games just don't have very. have, like, long cutscenes between hits and all that sort of stuff,

but these ones were, like, big, epic sort of things. If you have let me briefly getting on one of my hobby horses about this, is one thing that I think fan games don't understand, or that's a very broad thing to say, so obviously I don't mean it, as broad as it sounds, that's very horrible. But one thing I find I found in a lot of fan games, not just of Sonic, but no, actually of Sonic is just what we're talking about, is I feel like the bosses in these classic Sonic games

are usually not much more than kind of a reward for finishing this. they're just this thing you get to bop about and you don't really worry that much. Apart from the later ones, you know, they're not really that difficult and you can take them down quite quickly. And I found in a lot of fan games, it just seemed to be that this has got to be like difficult.

It's got to be very challenging. It's got to be kind of epic. And I often found that that was something that was not really grasped. But then again, saying that makes it sound like I'm the guy who decides what Sonic Bosses should be like and that's not the case. I don't think that.

It's just, you know, anything I'm coming out here and coming out with my sort of perspective, obviously but it's difficult though isn't it because like the whole fan gaming scene in particular is it it can be whatever it wants to be that's the thing isn't it it's like it's something i want to dig into at some point as well we'll get to it we'll get to it yeah because at this point especially from 2010 onwards sonic fan games do kind of set on their path if you're making a 2d sonic game it's very much like okay it has to have that 16 bit style momentum and physics and it's very much like what if Sonic continued onto the

Saturn? That seems to be the modern trade at the moment. Whereas in the early 2000s it felt a little bit more experimental because the software that they were using to develop the games was very limited so you had to be a little bit more creative in what you could achieve. So as a result you get all these really sort of strange experiments

and lots of humorous stuff, you know? Yeah, there wasn't like a blueprint yet. Yeah, absolutely. So the development of things, because it's now easier to just pick a 16 bit accurate engine and just go okay cool I'm making a sonic game now it just means that nowadays that's that's very much what we were striving to achieve and now that we're there

that's kind of all you get whereas prior it was yeah very much that we were still reaching towards that so we had to create all this weird stuff and as a result I think there's a nostalgia for that weird stuff that I have now that I didn't appreciate at the time because everybody was trying trying to get to accurate sonic physics and we weren't quite there yet So we made all this, yeah, interesting stuff. I feel like I'm talking too much. But for me, what I feel it is, is if you're striving to emulate something that exists,

and because you're not pro, and that doesn't mean you're bad at it. It just means you don't have access to the tools and the testing suites and all that sort of stuff. Yeah. You're not going to reach it, and it's going to feel lacking. But if you're doing your own thing,

it can't, you know, it can't really fail. You can't, because, I mean, I've played fan games where I've kind of gone, like, I don't like this because they're basically doing Sonic 3 but it's not the level design is nowhere near as good and it just doesn't work for me and then I sort of think if they weren't doing Sonic 3 I probably would love this

because I just keep thinking about Sonic 3 when I'm playing it and you know I don't want to be unfair because I mean I'm of the opinion that you can criticize things that are free Oh yeah no no no absolutely But that's not why I don't want to come across like I'm just being like yeah these aren't official Sonic games

so they're not you know that they don't have value No, they're not exempt of criticism, for sure, absolutely. I mean, that's what I do on Sega driven, you know? Yeah, I think it's taken a long time for them to reach a stage where I can say, like, this actually stands alongside. I mean, there's a Sonic fan game coming up that I like better than Sonic Mania, and I kind of consider Sonic Mania to be like a Sonic fan game that they gave the Thuns Up, essentially, because it has so many of the tropes of those games.

Absolutely. But sorry, I'm getting ahead of us. I do apologize. No, the only reason I wanted to mention that Blake Fepa kind of made, these in isolation and didn't really like upload demos and stuff is because before the sequel Aftermath and Corona Adventure are very much Metroidvania games and it's like I don't know whether the community would have responded well to that because everybody was striving towards 2D's accurate 16 bits of momentum and physics and here's someone just going well what if

it was a different genre and just dump them on the internet and it's like go nuts have fun and enjoy these and I think there's some of the more creative and more interesting games that came out of this The creator of before the sequel, after the sequel, they were the ones behind the spark the electric jester, right? Yeah, so what else? Yeah, so it might be good to mention it now, but like part of some of the cool stuff with these fan games, people who are making these fan games,

is that it's that sort of, it's a testing ground for them to make a game in general, and now, you know, when these games were made in, you know, early 2012, now, nowadays, you can actually make your own game. and use all those tools who actually make something cool. So Lake Vepa then went and made Spark the Electric Jester, which is still, I think, made in the

Sonic World's engine. Yeah, I mean, I'm looking at before the sequel aftermath and it is Spark the Electric Jester. Yeah. You even have an ability where he's got the jester hat and he's using the wand sort of thing in Aftermath, yeah. Yeah, and it's like,

it's a game where you're like, this little jester guy, but he can switch Elf hats that does like, sort of like dynamite heady. Yes. But there's like a huge amount of stuff and like he made that Sparklelected the Jester and now he's made like two sequels to that that are like

3D, almost like Sonic like Sonic Adventure, Sonica unleash style games which are you can get these on the switch, you know, you can get these on PC. Um, like he's been able to use all that stuff and create these characters to now actually

make a business and do this for real life. Yeah. It's, I mean, Spark the electric gesture, can I talk about it real briefly? Spark fascinates me, the first one I said that, because I haven't actually put much time into the other two, because I'm more of a two-d guy, anyway, hence this podcast. And the, Spark the Electric gesture fascinates me, because I have been

playing it on and off since pretty much not that long after it came out on Steam. And I'm still not finished it. Like, that game's long. Like, why is it so long? I can't believe it. I can't get over it. time I finish it and I feel like I've beaten what seems like a climactic boss, it just keeps going. And that's cool. I'm not criticizing that. I just find it, there's something

fascinatingly sort of fan game DNA about it, obviously, in this idea of like, no, we don't have to be that. We don't have to be sure. We don't have to have brevity. We can just have an kind of epically long Sonic game. I love that. I mean, that was always the appeal of Sonic before and after the sequel was just like, they dropped out of nowhere and all of a sudden you've got two massive Sonic games to just explore. After the sequel is enormous. as well, like a really, really long game. And again, made to a really high standard. I just, yeah, I love that things like this can happen every time, every now and again.

Like, you'll just be in the community and all of a sudden, where did this come from? Like, you know, it's awesome. And even with those games, they've been updated over time by other people in the community. So, like, you can, like, they've, they've updated it to, like, latest versions of the multimedia fusion. And they've also been able to do, like, Android ports. So, like, you know, you can just get. the APK of the game and then load that onto your Android phone

and then you can play it on the go and stuff like that. These updated versions, I assume, as with many of these games, they're on like stuff like Game Jolt or Banana or whatever now. Something like that. It's more mods, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. But that's fascinating. I mean, one of the issues I had before the sequel, it's not with the game, it's the fact

that I couldn't get it to work. Like, it would, it's either going to be in a tiny wind or it doesn't work, and I'd love to check it out if it's been updated. The cutscenes cause it to sort of crash on modern systems and things. Yeah, yeah. There's a version of after the sequel that someone's done called AfterSQL Omega,

which makes it widescreen, adds the drop dash. Why mean? So, yeah, there's lots of nice little bits on bobs kicking around now that make these a little bit more future-proofed. And these have really impressive soundtracks as well, didn't they these things? Yeah, completely custom. I'm trying to remember who the guy doing the music on was these, but yeah, they're

also just completely original soundtracks. They're not, we've long gone past the days where we're just nicking middies off websites and into the games then into the games. I've had a thought, because this is, we're getting towards an hour and a half.

What I think we should do is we should talk about Roboblast 2, because that's one of the big ones. Yeah. And we should consider doing a part two where we talk about the remaining recent ones and also stealth, tax man, all that whole thing, and how they intersect with the main sort of series as well. Because I think that's a whole episode, honestly. Yeah. If you'd be up for that, I think that would be the smart thing to do. Keep this one breezy and then do a second one covering the rest of it.

Do you think that's, should we do that? I'm happy to do that. For sure. Okay. So sorry to interrupt. that's all good. Ryan, do you want to lead on Robo Blast 2? Yeah, so Sonic Robo Blast 2, this game is, I would define it as, is the definition of insane. What if you made a Sonic game in Doom?

Yes. So, this was started by A.J. Freda. He, AJ was a friend of Johnny, and at the time, he was making, he made like a Sonic Doom. uh sort of wad where like you shot uh you shot grounder and coconuts on the adventures of sonic the hedge old cartoon and i think he almost i think he also made like a sonic quake mod or something like that as well he did lots of stuff a jay he did a he did a hidden palace fan game which he made out of screenshots of the magazine and like pieced it together to like make a playable version of hidden palace prior to anybody having access to the actual you know uh beta rom so yeah

So Sonic Roboblast actually originally started as a a click team game like a 2D click team game and they did release a like a Sonic Robo Blast Christmas game where I think

AJ did a lot of more like the artwork he liked making the sprites and so sort of had this you know maybe two three level demo that they sort of did as like hey we're going to make a sequel to this this is what's sort of going to look like. But then he started going a little bit more nuts

and going even further into his Doom engine stuff and at the time as well probably one of the inspirations of this was the unreleased Sonic Game Sonic Extreme never came out but through Chris Sen

I think who was the artist of that all the sprites of Sonic from Sonic Extreme were released onto the internet so what this allowed us to have is a eight-way moving Sonic Sprite with all the running animations,

all the jump animations, everything like that. And this was sort of the basis of the sprites from Sonic Robo Blast 2. And so he implemented that and then started trying to make Sonic levels in Doom. He originally released a demo

of a Sonic Robo Blast 2 Halloween that still used those extreme sprites. but were like, you know, I mean, big levels, you know, doing as much as you can with Doom at the time. Like, there's no slopes. There was like water and all this sort of stuff. But it was getting there. They then did like a Sonic Robo Blast 2 Christmas where there was a bunch of levels in that as well. But, you know, somehow making this a third-person game in Doom where you could jump, you could

what Sonic Robber Blast fans define as Fok, which is the not what's it called? It's not a homing attack, it's like a forward projecting like second jump you do in the air, isn't it? Yeah, the thing with A.J. Freda was like he did not like Sonic Adventure.

He was very much like, green-eyed Sonic, boo, go away. This was, he had a website called Sega Sonic. net and that was all about like, no, boo, boo to green eyes Sonic and all this sort of stuff outside of that and also having uploads of, I think he had uploads of Adventures of the Hitchhog and Weird shows like Freakazoid and Project Geeker. It was what he was all about at the time. But yeah, they just sort of started making this game and it got bigger and bigger.

and basically got even crazier and crazier. And now Sonic Roboplast 2 is like one of the biggest fan games ever, has a huge community about it, has been updated millions of times with brand new levels. Like, it looks fantastic. Like you are going, they've done stuff now. You can actually do like slopes and everything to this engine. I don't even know how much of it still is doing.

Yeah, because the limitations of the Doom engine is you can't put rooms on top of other rooms and they've managed to figure out a way to do that now in the most recent releases of Sonic Robo Blast 2. It's wild what they've managed to do with that engine. They've really pushed it to its absolute limits. There's multiplayer as well, right? Yeah, online multiplayer.

So that's one of the things I think that has actually been very successful with using the Doom engine is that it actually has a lot of the stuff that Doom has. And so part of that is being able to have multiplayer, but also being able to do mods. And one of the most prominent things, so if you, this game is available on srb2.org, and part of that as well is that you can go and go through their forum and find all these mods that people have made for this game. And it's just insane.

So, like, and because people have become very infatuated with what the design, the way that's, the way that. Sonic, the AJ Freda drew over these Sonic Extreme sprites that's sort of been the style of the game, but now you can do all these mods where they've added like, here's all the chaotic that you can now play and

do stuff where you know, it has all these, the things that these characters could do in 2D but now in 3D they can climb you know, you can play as knuckles where you can climb up every wall in the game. Tails can fly everywhere. There are mods where

The craziest mods I've seen someone made a mod of adding Spiro to the game. So you can go around as Spiro, like a 2D sprite of Spiro going around and like flaming all the enemies and it still all sort of works. Someone made an insane

Metroid Prime mod where it's a first, it goes back to first person. It looks like it does everything that Metroid Prime does. That's wise. You can click on an enemy and it'll tell you about the enemy like all the shit

that Metroid Prime does but it's now in the Sonic Robo Blast 2 game it's and people have made like I've made a level pack that tries to make remake all the levels

in Sonic Adventure but now it's in Doom they and there are like character mods that make it play like Sonic Adventure you can have boosting you can do

doming attacks now it's they've added to it it's mad you can do multiplayer someone's made a like a warrior-ware style mini-game online multiplayer version where it sort of goes into a room and you must do this thing

and everything within that. And I guess one other thing to mention with Sonic RoboBlast 2, which we can sort of just quick bring up here, is Sonic RoboBlast 2 cart and what's called Robotnik's Ring Races. This basically takes Sonic RoboBlast 2, but what if it was a cart game? and impossible.

Yeah, it's also as insane as Roboblast 2 is as well. Yeah, the amount of mods that's caused as well, yeah. It's incredible. Oh, well, I mean, to their credit, they have added a disclaimer to the site now that says this is not pick up and play, this is hard. Like, don't expect to...

Oh, yeah. That's not a criticism. I'm glad they've done that because when I downloaded this, I couldn't get through the tutorial. It was rough. The tutorial is extensive and you really need to pay attention. It's a very high-level game. It is. So Sonic Robber Blast 2 cart was a lot simpler.

It was very much just like a cart game in a Mario Kart style, but people could just make their own characters in it. Like you could add Hatsunay Miku, or you could add, you know, people just love going, you know what, here's, I've known Nathan Drake as a car in this style or something like that. It's quite simple in that regard, but very fun. I mean, it's still like the physics of it are a little wonky, but it's probably as bad as good as you could probably get. It's an incredibly impressive, yeah.

Yeah. And then Robotnik Ring Races is the sort of version 2.0 of that. And that has definitely got just a lot of stuff going on in it. It's very different of a game. You are collecting rings. I tried playing it again for this podcast, part of the unfortunate thing is it's just complicated. It's sort of over-designed a little bit.

But, I mean, the people who love it, love it. But I just found it really hard for me to play. It's like you have to, there are areas where if you hit, you have to get a certain speed, and then you can go through these links and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah, I, I, um, this is, it just to be very clear, as I'm sure it was,

we talked about it, but like, so, excuse me, um, ring race is the one. the one I'm talking about when I said about the tutorial, because I could not clear it. Like, it's not a matter of, like, I don't think it comes down. I mean, there is a degree of, you know, get good, but also with a game like this, I did feel kind of like, should I have, should I have to be this good just to get into it? Like, isn't there's a bit much. It's a sonic game, right?

Like, we should be a little bit more approachable. It's like the opposite of what a sonic game is, which is a pick-up and play experience. But, you know, they have every right to make that. They have every right to do as polished a job as they clearly have. I just think it's not for me, that's all. Yeah, that's it, isn't it? And that's fan gaming in a nutshell. You know, it doesn't have to be for everybody.

You can make the game that you want to make. It doesn't matter. But at the same time, yeah, it doesn't mean that it's exempt from criticism. It's more just a case of, yeah, not everything is going to be for everyone. I mean, we haven't mentioned, I mean, there's a game we haven't mentioned yet, which we'll talk about in a follow-up, because it's one of my all-time favorite Sonic games. And I'll leave the exciting reveal for part two. But I want to say, serious, thanks to both of you. Thanks, Lewis.

Thanks, Ryan, for doing this. There's more to be done. We have more work to do. It's a couple of this. And I want to cover the bridge between these fan games and Sonic Mania, which is in some ways the ultimate fan game. And basically the trajectory they've taken, of course, the existence of Sonic Mania hasn't in any way.

Well, it's done nothing but spur on more. Absolutely. Which is great, but we'll get to that. And I guess the best thing to say is you can check out all these games via, well Sonic Fan Games HQ or via Google as well as another option. Sorry, I don't mean to take your traffic away by mentioning Google.

But no, Ryan, where can just end up? Where can people find you online and sort of see what you're up to these days? Yeah, so a little bit about me. So I'm actually a video game designer by trade as well. I have worked on game, I've been a game designer for 15 years.

I've worked on games like Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joride and Doomsday Clicker and Half Brick Studios and their pickpock. But I am currently in between jobs, so please hire me. I am currently trying to find a new place

to work. I am currently working a little bit on the side with a group called Spicy Gyro. They made a game called Panic Porcupine, which is a Sonic Meets Meat Boy type of game. I am working with them a little bit, so check out Panic Porcupine.

I also run now still in Sonic stuff. Sonic the Hedgeblog.com. That's also on Twitter and Tumblr and everything else as well. I post stuff every day about that. And also check out my portfolio at makesvideogames.com where I go through deep in all the sort of games I've worked on. And if you're looking to hire a cool game designer that does level design, UX design and a bit of everything, Please check that out. Excellent. And Lewis, where can we still find...

I think regular listeners should know this by now, but nonetheless. Yeah, so you can find me at sagaredivin.com, which is a Sega fan site and information resource about all things Sega. And it has an accompanying YouTube channel, YouTube.com forward slash at Sega Driven, where I cover lots of different Sega things, retro and modern, and also extensive fan game coverage as well of sage events and Sonic Hacking Contest in particular as well. But yeah, I also want to thank Ryan for his work on Sonic the Hedgeblog because it gives me an awful lot of stuff to re-blog on Tumblr. Keeping me in an active Tumblr base. So thank you very much.

I appreciate that. Yeah, thanks both of you. For those of you listening to this now, which hopefully is everyone who's hearing me talk, I can't imagine how else they would be, you can support Retronauts on Patreon. com forward slash retronauts and you can get exclusive episodes to epithful exclusive episodes per month for $5 a month as well as getting every weekly episode a week early so just to quote Richard Herring again you'll be the coolest kids on the playground and you also get access to diamond fights this week in retro columns which are also recorded as podcasts and are excellent as well

as many other exciting benefits like the disc the retronauts discord so you can come on there and you can you can say as many swear words as you like at me and I'm not allowed to retaliate at all because I'd be at travel risk if I did thanks very much for listening we'll be back hopefully hopefully soon with the second part of this because there's a lot more to cover

and that's going to bridge into as I mentioned the Sonic mania stuff tax man stealth all those all your favourites all your Sonic favourites as the Sonic content does not stop the train never ends more I say yeah exactly there's always be more

sonic whenever any episode is not about Sonic, I want you to go on and I want you to complain and say, why isn't this about Sonic? Okay? Thanks for listening. Take care. See you next time. Bye-bye. Thank you.