Sonic Origins developer "very unhappy" with Sega and the final version of the game
Headcannon founder, Simon Thomley, has spoken out about the release version of Sonic Origins – and he's not happy.
Sonic Origins hasn't been receieved too warmly at launch. As well as delisting classic games ahead of the Origins launch, Sega also caught critisism from fans for carving up the compilation title into pieces via DLC.
Further to that, we're starting to see players figure out some wild glitches and bugs in the title. Just last night, a Twitch streamer discovered that you can effectively skip all of the '& Knuckles' portion of Sonic 3 & Knuckles by restarting and heading to Hidden Palace. Eep.
But how did the game launch in this condition – after all, we've seen plenty of Sonic re-releases in our time, and they've all turned out pretty good. A thread of tweets from Headcannon (Sonic Origins dev) founder Simon ‘Stealth’ Thomley gives us a little bit of insight.
“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,” said Thomley in the thread. “Integration introduced some wild bugs that conventional logic would have one believe were our responsibility - a lot of them aren’t.
"Regarding Origins, we were outsiders creating a separate project that was then wrangled into something entirely different. We knew going in that there would be a major time crunch and we worked ourselves into the ground to meet it just so this would even be made and released."
Thomley concedes that the Headcannon team did make “some actual mistakes" as well as "some overlooking, some rushjobs, some stuff we noticed but weren’t allowed to correct near the end” – but goes on to note that Sega's portion of development introduced more bugs that weren't in the build provided by Headcannon.
As a result, Headcannon asked to make some "major fixes" towards launch, but was told it couldn't action them because of the way submission works ahead of a game's release. Per Thomley, Headcannon “repeatedly” inquired about delays, but Sega wouldn't budge.
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“I’m extremely proud of my team for their performance under such pressure, but every one of us is very unhappy about the state of Origins and even the Sonic 3 component. We weren’t too thrilled about its pre-submission state either but a lot was beyond our control.”
So what happens next? Will we see some fixes and updates to the game? Maybe. Thomley hasn't completely shut Sega out, and the oppertunity for post-release work is on the table. "I’m willing to do more work under the right conditions; whether they want to work with me again is an entirely separate matter,” he noted.Sonic Origins is out now for PlayStation and Xbox consoles, as well as Switch and PC through the Epic Games Store and Steam.