Disclaimer that I worked on Sonic Mania, and disclaimer that a lot of what I'm about to post comes from my own personal perspective, and I represent neither SEGA nor PagodaWest/Christian/etc. as a team.
The following is actually a post I typed up in response to the OP of this thread but never got around to posting. It was written before the Rolling Stone interview was published so I kind of feel vindicated that a lot of my views are parallel to that of Christian. It has much to do with what people can and cannot learn from the existence of a project like Sonic Mania.
I've had a lot of thought about how gaming fans turning professional is a necessary facet of the industry very much prior to Sonic Mania itself, as it's how I broke into the industry doing commercial work after doing music for fan projects, and this is (pretty long) after being active in the Quake/Quake2 modding community - a community from which a LOT of current AAA talent in the west cultivated their skills before being recruited. I thought about making a thread on this topic/tangent but it never was the right time of framing.
First, let's address this right here:
Originally Posted by ASaiyan
As we all know, SEGA recently moved forward in its quest to Make Sonic Great Again by cutting itself entirely out of the design process [1] - and it went pretty damn well. The game was lovingly crafted by fan creators with a serious passion for and understanding of the series, people heaped praises on it for bringing back the classic tight Sonic gameplay of yore, and SEGA made some good money and a lot of good PR for pretty cheap [2] (only paying for a handful of devs and some old-school 2D graphics). Everybody won.
[1] You'd be surprised how much input SEGA and Sonic Team had on the game, but I'm not at liberty to disclose details, so we'll leave it at that.
[2] This sentence strikes me as extremely reductive and incorrect, and would have been the main topic of my thread.
I think there's a general presumption, just from the fact that many/most of the people who worked on Sonic Mania had fan game/rom hacking background, that it's as simple as throwing money at a bunch of fans and getting something good. There are two key facets here that get lost in that reduction:
A) The talent and knowledge to design a game.
B) The accountability and reliability to pull it off to the end.
So
THE TALENT AND KNOWLEDGE TO DESIGN A GAME
Sonic's fan community, as has been pointed out, is bizarre but has a lot of exceptionally driven people that have reverse-engineered the classic games in the franchise down to a science. This sticks out because Sonic itself had very, very complex physics for a game of its time largely down to the genius of Yuji Naka, so nailing that, on top of general video game design philosophies like proper pacing, good level design, good art that makes things clear, etc. was something of a golden goose and had a sense of accomplishment when it was nailed. Other people in the Sonic fan community have gone on to make extremely solid platformers unrelated to the franchise - Freedom Planet and Spark just to name two, along with PagodaWest's Major Magnet (more on that in a moment)
Christian Whitehead and Simon Thomley deserve all the credit they get just for this feat alone, and then some. It's not easy recreating not just the physics of the old game, but the overall feel and flow of "Sonic", which gives and takes control from the player in a seemingly contradictory fundamental game design directions.
What's also often lost in the reduction is Christian programmed both a game engine and SDK that allows projects like Mania to actually be made, iterated on, tested, deployed and patched. The game isn't just a bunch of assets duct-taped together by one programmer (which largely isn't scalable) - other people need to be able to use the toolset too.
Originally Posted by NotLiquid
"Mania" treatment feels like kind of a misnomer for what's being asked. Sonic Mania was just such a given because fans have had decade-long histories of putting out incredible Sonic fan games that mirror classics or come with a plethora of unique spins and ideas. It was easy to say something like "Christian Whitehead should make a Sonic game" because both him and Stealth were experts on the engines of the 2D classics and I think the circumstance in which Mania came together has to do with more than just "lets make a classic-styled revival".
Great post. I won't say there aren't any Christian Whiteheads for other franchises out there (there probably are) but he really, REALLY was the singular perfect person for the job as far as the classic Sonic experience went.
That aside, I'd like to focus on:
ACCOUNTABILITY AND RELIABILITY TO PULL IT OFF TO THE END
(while there's sort of a baseline and due process, there aren't any rigid mandates, so even what I say here generally have exceptions to the rule, because everyone's individual case is different.)
What gets lost a lot in these discussions are the transitional steps for the people who worked on Sonic Mania. A bunch of fans didn't go straight from making romhacks to making a brand new official game. No company is ever going to risk that kind of investment, both in finances/resources as well as branding, on a relatively unknown quantity, even if they've put out great fan works.
I'm going to go out on a bit of a tangent here. Short, reductive personal backstory: I attended music college and while working on my final year stuff did music for a couple of Sonic fan games because I really, really liked the franchise (heck, my final project in a video game scoring module was Sonic-related) Those things, along with a bunch of other work, was a pretty strong portfolio and I eventually started working on a bunch of games and game concerts in various capacities - engineering, composition, etc.
SPECIFICALLY because it appeared I was a fan-turned-professional, I often got correspondence asking me to listen to stuff or 'put in a good word' and the like, and let me say I've thought long and hard about what separates a hobbyist from a professional while responding.
In the scope of, say, game music covers, the hobbyist can cherry pick what they want to do. If Blinded By Light sticks out to someone as the greatest JRPG battle theme of all time, they can cover that, get a shit ton of views and followers (which isn't a bad thing, mind you), and that's that. The professional working on a game, on the other hand, does not have this type of luxury to pick and choose. If you're writing for a JRPG, you can't just do battle music. You need to tackle towns, locales, character themes, event music, the works. It doesn't matter how good your battle themes are if every village in the game sounds like a call to war or some such.
The hobbyist doesn't need to deal with changing scope, looming deadlines, supporting a vision that's not their own, taking criticism to heart, knowing which creative battles to pick and which to let go. I'm not saying these things are completely missing from hobby projects, especially in a group. I'm saying it's not essential to deal with them, since livelihood isn't at stake when something is merely a hobby you can walk away from at any given point of time.
So, step one, a calling card isn't effective if it's simply a bunch of art or music free-floating. If one manage to do this with a fully fledged project and see it through to completion, that's a much stronger case when a project manager is looking to recruit for a certain undertaking, since there's proof that everything required to see a project through on a creative level is there. In summary, the proof of accountability and reliability is just as important, if not more, than simply having a good portfolio.
If we brought that a step further, I would also say that fan games and romhacks, while a good demonstration of the creative side, does poorly as a demonstration of accountability and reliability, especially from a business and legal perspective. Any project needs to have a clear hierarchy. A lot of people on the team that worked on Mania aren't there solely because they 'get' the franchise. They're also there because they're reliable, understand game development as a business either from having shipped games, or from strong vouching:
- PagodaWest, as mentioned, shipped Major Magnet
- Christian Whitehead obviously had a strong calling card with the CD remaster, and with the inclusion of Simon on 1 and 2 remasters, showed that anyone he recruited for the project would be both reliable and essential.
- Tee Lopes worked on Major Magnet.
- Paul Veer worked on games like Nuclear Throne and official Sonic prints.
- Many others have officially worked with SEGA in the past in various capacities.
(I don't intentionally want to leave people on the team out, but I think the above alone gets the point across)
There's quite a bit of due process here. A business entity is essentially mandatory because a commercial game is a business undertaking, and you want all your potential liabilities covered because funding a game is not cheap - I'm not saying Sonic Mania is AAA, but it's still very, very much a commercial undertaking. No IP holder is going to give a bunch of money to a bunch of people with no recourse should said people just disappear off the face of the earth, or lose interest, or break NDA or share trade secrets, or fail to fill in tax paperwork, or decide to start being dicks for whatever reason*. Accountability, accountability, accountability.
*if someone is constantly screaming in public that a brand sucks (which is a clear problem with the Sonic community) that person is... likely simply not going to work with anything official in any capacity regardless of what he has or hasn't done. It's the height of delusion to think any company would want to work with such a person.
I think that there's a lot that the industry at large can learn from the development and mere existence of Sonic Mania. However, a lot of wrong messages can and are also being sent out which are poisonous to the real lessons. What did SEGA do right, in this case? Help foster an active fan work community. Reach out to the right people at the right time, and take things one step at a time. What didn't SEGA actually do? Throw money at a bunch of fans with no due process. I don't think Mania would have existed without all the intermediary steps of first the CD remaster, then 1, then 2 with a completely original zone, and so on and so forth.
If there's something I'd like to say in closing, recruiting fans really, REALLY isn't new, although it's probably groundbreaking for a Japanese IP, even if Sonic has been bigger in the west vs Japan for a long time now. CS, DotA, TF2, LoL, these are all franchises that either were mods at one point of time, or designed by people who were mod makers in the case of LoL/Guinsoo. Black Mesa started out as a hobbyist project. Tower Defense, MOBAs, survival FPS as entire genres generally all started as fan undertakings which latched on to a more widespread appeal. A lot of current AAA talent started out in the Doom/Quake/Unreal modding communities. Think about the opposite here for a second. If people who ended up working on games weren't fan of games (or specific franchises) and fans of tinkering with games and game creation to begin with, what even is the alternative? Great devs don't magically fall out of the sky. In other words, fans and professionals aren't mutually exclusive categorizations.
(P.S. I don't really know where to chuck this in, but on the whole facet of Sonic Mania being a commercial undertaking and not a fan game, Hunter Bridges does not get enough credit to how essential his role was in getting the game shipped)
Player
