=====================3. The History of Sonic 2 HD
=====================
The idea of creating a high definition version of Sega's classic Sonic the Hedgehog 2
first appeared on a website called "Alchemist Defined". An artist calling himself
Billy had drawn an incredibly impressive piece of artwork, which showed Sonic about
to fight the last boss of the game in the "Death Egg Zone". The low-resolution sprites
were richly brought to life in this phenomenal piece of artwork: both the background
and the characters had been completely remastered. A number of video gaming websites
quickly discovered the image and were soon showing it off on their homepages.
The question had been posed; "What would Sonic 2 look like in high definition?"
The "Sonic Retro" community had always taken a keen interest in all things related to
Sonic's classical era. On December 6th 2007, a member of this community
called "Athelstone" found Billy's image and excitedly posted it in the General discussion
forums, while asking the very same question - what would it be like?. The thread was
soon moved to the "Creative Works" section of the forum.
Three months later, on March 8th 2008, a member of Sonic Retro called "Vangar"
created a discussion thread asking for a game engine he could use to start work
on such a project. The thread gained a surprising amount of interest! Many members
of the community quickly began to post concept images of what the game ought to
look like. To begin with, fans would merely apply graphical filters to the original
low-resolution graphics. A member called "Yarharhar" then posted an image of a
completely remastered Sonic, along with a method describing how he had drawn it!
It was not long until a member of the community called "Vincent" was so inspired
by Yarharhar's effort, that he took it upon himself to begin remastering a whole
set of Sonic's character frames. Sonic 2 HD had begun!
However, the most difficult tasks still lay ahead of the project. How would we
organize ourselves to achieve this goal? What game engine would be used to make
it a reality? One possibility was to use a modified Genesis emulator, which would
display the graphics from the original game ROM in high definition. However, it was
decided that this would be far too limiting for the project. This is because the
bugs and slow downs from the original game would be replicated, rather than fixed
and improved upon. It would also be impossible to expand upon the project if its
foundation was just an emulator.
Another possibility was to use a custom made engine that had already been created.
A member of the community called "Taxman" had already created a popular Sonic
engine called "Retro Sonic". Unluckily, the physics in his engine were not yet
close enough to the original genesis series for it to be used (despite the fact
that Taxman's engine boasted an incredibly impressive level development kit for
designing original Sonic levels). It was likely that Taxman would eventually perfect
the physics in his engine - but rather than wait for him to accomplish this, the
community thirsted for the Sonic 2 HD project to move forward.
After a time, a staff team had been formed. Since Vincent had already remastered
many of Sonic's frames, he became the project leader and the lead artist.
A member called "SANiK" had even created an online database, which allowed
contributors to upload all of their artwork, while members "Athelstone" and
"Blue Streak" coordinated some of the community's contributions while giving
suggestions and guidance to other project staff. Eventually, the administrators
of Sonic Retro granted us our own community forum for the Sonic 2 HD project -
but we still didn't have an engine!
Members of the community were starting to cast doubt upon the project - was it
really going to become a reality or not? Then, out of the blue, a long-running
member of the community called "LOst" privately informed the project staff that
he had already been developing his own engine for a number of years and would
like to be a part of the project. The staff were astounded at the accuracy of
his physics, since they were based upon Sonic 3 (which fixed many of the bugs
present in Sonic 2's physics). We finally had an engine! On September 15th 2008
the first technical demo of Sonic 2 HD was released - Sonic has returned!
