Sonic Origins developer isn’t happy with the way Sega handled its release

One of the developers behind the component games of Sega’s Sonic Origins collection has spoken out on Twitter to defend their team in light of the collection’s numerous alleged bugs. Headcannon founder Simon Thornley, also known as Stealth, took responsibility for some of the collection’s issues in a lengthy series of tweetbut said that “a lot was beyond our control”.

“This is frustrating,” Thornley said. “I won’t lie and say that there weren’t issues in what we gave to Sega, but what is in Origins is also not what we turned in. Integration introduced some wild bugs that conventional logic would have one believe were our responsibility – a lot of them aren’t.”

“We want these problems to be addressed,” Thornley continued. “We provided a ton of feedback during and after development for both Origins and its Sonic 3 integration. We’ve done a good chunk of work after our work term was over to fix things, support Sega, and to prepare for future updates.” Thornley went on to clarify that Sega have yet to agree to Headcannon’s offer of supporting Sonic Origins with post-release fixes and updates.

The Sonic Origins collection launched on June 23rd, which also happened to be Sonic’s 31st birthday. Twitter is awash with dissatisfied punters pointing out issues with the collection’s reworked version of classic Sonic games. This one, with Dr Robotnik seemingly giving up and just hovering above Sonic and Tails, is among the most bizarre I’ve seen so far. There’s a substantial thread here with plenty more, ranging from Tails’ plane being stuck in midair to repeating cutscenes.

Sonic fans aren’t too chuffed that the music in the collection’s version of Sonic 3 & Knuckles has been altered from the original either. There’s some speculation, including from Sonic’s creator Yuji Naka, that the change was to avoid licensing issues with tracks that the late ‘King of Pop’ Michael Jackson may have contributed to the game. I say ‘may have’, because even Naka doesn’t seem to know for sure. Sega have also come under fire for delisting the older versions of the classic games in the Sonic Origins collection.

Sonic Origins is on Steam and the Epic Games Store for £33/$40/€40. Try not to get stuck.