Wow it’s like a Christmas miracle… or rather a Sonic the Hedgehog birthday miracle – as the day after Sonic’s 23rd birthday (yesterday) the Sonic 2 HD Facebook page suddenly sprang to life, announcing that the development for Sonic 2 HD had been revived.
For those that don’t know, Sonic 2 HD (aka S2HD) is a completely unofficial fan project recreating Sonic the Hedgehog 2, but with crisp, modern visuals and animations – while (impressively) keeping the original feeling and experience of the game and we aren’t talking about the crappy ‘HD’ overlay that SEGA used in its SEGA Classics releases on XBLA and PSN. And here’s a video to show you just how sexy the game was looking back then:
However, development of Sonic 2 HD didn’t get much further than the Alpha release of the game, when, back in November 2012, there was some controversy surrounding the project when a ‘keylogger’ was found in the program code, one of the team members, ‘L0st’, allegedly held the project hostage and a programming element was removed from the code which effectively stopped the game’s development.After that incident the project seemed to just disappear and the Sonic 2 HD Facebook page ceased updating on 12th November 2012… that is until yesterday (24th June 2014) when the S2HD Facebook page was updated with the great news. What’s surprising is that it wasn’t the original team that decided to revive the project, a fan of the project submitted his own engine to the S2HD project leader, for evaluation and after integrating art assets from the original alpha release the project leader began to let the rest of the prior team members know.
So a Sonic fan of a Sonic fan project of a classic Sonic game has helped to bring life back to what looks like possibly one of the best Sonic fan projects around (try saying that fast 10 times):
“The only thing more surprising than seeing an official post from us here is our announcing that S2HD is no longer dead.
“You read that correctly: work has once again begun on Sonic 2 HD! That said, we’d like to give you all a brief tie-in for recent events leading to the project’s reboot.
….
“We’ll provide more details in how you can help us out in the next few days. It’s good to be back!”
They also say in the post that the original Alpha release has been discontinued, but hopefully we will see a new playable Alpha release soon. Read the full Facebook post here and stay tuned to see how this project develops.
[Source: S2HD Facebook, via SonicRetro]