Sonic HQ

Director Jeff Fowler just announced the news on Twitter. Fowler says the team is taking time “to make Sonic just right.” The new release date is February 14, 2020. That’s a little more than three months after the original release date. It also means that Sonic will no longer hit theaters during the lucrative holiday season. However, it will probably have less competition in its new February slot.

Many fans had wondered if they could fix the CGI that quickly and the answer was no. Reception was mostly negative when the original trailer was released. Even the creators of Sonic, Yuji Naka and Naoto Oshima weren't happy with the designs. Now we can have assurance that they are really going to take the time necessary to fix the design of Sonic. It won't get that sweet holiday slot anymore, however it's likely to do better in February with less competition for cinema dollars.

And as always, stay tuned to Sonic HQ for all of the latest Sonic-related news!

The same people behind the Sea3on fan comics(Fans United For SATAM) who answer the question, "what if the story in SatAm didn't stop so abruptly?" are now working their hardest to make an animated version of "Sea3on." Sea3on tells the continuing struggle of the Freedom Fighters, now up against new enemies and on new adventures as if the story never ended! They have recently acquired lots of talent to help with this project. They have found an amazing story board artist for the project, a VA director,  past and current S3 staff, as well as a handful of industry professionals that have also expressed interest in getting an animated episode up and running ranging from background painters to music composers.

They have launched a patreon to help with funding for the animation(as it can be costly) as well as to provide a place where you will be getting updates, story boards, animation bits (Including a promo animation we pushed out) and much more.

Check out the press release on their site. They also have a Twitter account to follow updates. Let us know in the comments and/or forum if you would like to see this become a thing and also let us know if you've followed their fan comics.

Sega just revealed the next 10 games to be included in their new Genesis/Mega Drive Mini console.

Sonic Spinball is making its way to the English side. Not a game I personally would've selected, but I know it has its fans. That's four Sonic games for the English console, including Sonic 1, 2, and Mean Bean Machine.

Capcom has officially thrown their hat into the ring with Street Fighter II, Ghouls'n Ghosts and... Mega Man: The Wily Wars! The compilation of the first three Mega Man games (plus a cool original fourth game) was (in)famously a Sega Channel exclusive in the US, never receiving a physical release. Other highlights include the excellent Beyond Oasis and Phantasy Star IV. Nothing too surprising, overall.

Over in Japan, however, there was a livestream that did bring a few surprises. It turns out you can use a USB hub to get some 4-player action going! They announced a few 4P-compatible games, most definitely Japan-exclusives, the big one being... Yuu Yuu Hakusho: Makyou Toitsusesn!! An amazing fighting game from Treasure based on the famous anime/manga. It's been a highly requested game based on Japanese polls, and it's stupidly expensive to boot. It's one of my favorite games on the system and I'm a bit sad knowing there's probably no chance of it being included in our version.

The final 10 games will be announced on June 4th, so get ready for that.

[Official site - US | JP]

I decided to take a quick look at some early Sonic fangames made in Dreams. If you don't know what Dreams is, it's by the creators of LittleBigPlanet, and is essentially a tool that allows you to create games, art, music, movies and has almost no limitations unlike LittleBigPlanet. Dreams allows users to create their own physics as well assets, all with easy-to-use creation tools. Basically if you can dream it, you can make it!  I can see this opening up opportunties to make fangames for people who don't have the knowhow of making their own engines or modding existing engines.

The game hasn't fully launched yet and has been in early access less than a month so I was surprised so much content has been made with Sonic in it. I decided to capture a bit of footage from various projects. Not all of them are polished and some have a number of bugs but what they were able to accomplish in less than a month is quite impressive. Who knows what we'll have several years from now. Read on further for a look at all of the levels.

Lad Bible has done an interview with Sonic Team's Iizuka and it has just been published. We will highlight segments here but please go read the full interview.

When talking upcoming Sonic games:

Team Sonic Racing comes out for the expected platforms on 21 May, and might not be the only Sonic game we see in 2019. Perhaps it’s a quirk of translation – Iizuka-san speaks Japanese, I don’t, so we converse through a very helpful middleman – but he makes a reference to there being Sonic titles, plural, in development right now.

On the upcoming movie:

 “It’s not a SEGA movie – we’re not making it, or anything – and I’m only an advisor, really. But I do get shown things, and the [movie team] ask for my opinion. I’m also listening to what the fans are saying, and I’ll feed that back to the director – he, and the producers, are very interested in receiving that feedback. At the end of the day, it’s up to the team at Paramount to make something successful, but we’re all looking forward to seeing the finished movie.”

In light of the new movie trailer and hubbub that has surrounded it, I thought it would be a good idea to look back at past movie projects. To many seasoned Sonic veterans, this won't be anything new. However, I suspect a good deal of new fans and/or less hardcore fans have never heard of these cancelled movies. YouTuber PatMak does a great job of compiling all of this information into one video. It starts out with Sonic the Hedgehog: Wonders of the World which is pretty similar to the movie we have now where Sonic comes into the human world. Next is Sonic Armaggeddon based on the show SatAM. He goes on into the OVA and then the Sony Pictures version of Sonic the Hedgehog. Watch the following video for more indepth details.

We finally have a movie coming out after so many abandoned projects. Do any of the older projects sound good to you? How would your dream Sonic movie be directed? I'm sure everyone has their own idea for the "perfect" Sonic movie.

kukun kun has been uploading tons of rare old Japanese gaming TV shows and personal game recordings. This recently-uploaded episode of Famitsu's "Game Catalogue II" program covers E3 1996. The coverage of Sega's booth (starting around 9 minutes) shows some footage of the extremely ill-fated Sonic X-Treme. It looks pretty but there's not much to it. We see Sonic running around a flat room with a spiral of rings in the center.

Immediately after we get a look at the first level of Sonic 3D Blast for Genesis. It seems to just be called "Sonic Blast" at this point. A demo unit for the GameGear version seems to be sandwiched between two units for the Genesis game.

The channel has tons of interesting rarities. Here's a playlist of vintage gameplay from the Sega Game Library, a service somewhat similar to the Sega Channel, much of which has been lost to time. There's also footage from Nintendo's Satellaview service, and plenty more gaming-related TV shows. Give it a look!

On May 4th, Free Comic Book Day rears its head again. It includes previews, original content and reprints of popular stories. If you wish to find a store near you that participates on this day, the official website has a tracker you may use to locate such stores. Also, Tangle And Whisper #0 isn't a part of it, but it is so close to it that some stores are saving issues for it so good luck! Let us know what you nabbed in the comments/forum! 
https://www.freecomicbookday.com/StoreLocator

The Sonic the Hedgehog Movie trailer dropped on April 30th and was met with heavy backlash, particularly regarding Sonic's design. However, it would seem the criticism has not fallen on deaf ears, as film director, Jeff Fowler, responded with this:

What those changes will be and how drastic they'll be, we're still not sure. Sonic HQ will keep you updated as it happens.

Not only has Yuji Naka, former head of Sonic Team, voiced his concern (like almost everyone else) of Sonic's movie design (and feeling partially responsible for some reason - It's not your fault, Yuji!) but apparently he was also asked to be cast into the movie however it looks like something fell through.

Translated into English roughly with Microsoft:

Hollywood Sonic's design is unpopular and I was reminded by chance, the CG of this movie is like making, the predecessor of the Marza, Sega's Visual entertainment department because I made I felt sorry for my responsibility. https://www.marza.com/news/article/764/

Speaking of which, I was asked to make an extra cast in the movie, but it seems to have been forgotten. Because it was long ago, I also forgot. I wanted to appear in a Hollywood movie.

As we already saw earlier, it looks like we can expect more people that were involved with Sonic in the past to be in the movie in some way or another.