File:Sonic Mania- The Story of Christian Whitehead (Taxman) and Simon Thomley (Stealth).ogg

English: The history of how Christian Whitehead (Taxman) and Simon Thomley (Stealth) united the Sonic the Hedgehog fan community in order to create Sonic Mania is absolutely fascinating.

It's not normal for a games company to be quite as open and free with their mascot property as Sega has been with Sonic, lending him to a team of indie developers who don't exist as part of the internal Sega corporate structure, and who aren't beholden to the company's strict brand rules.

But Christian Whitehead is no ordinary developer, and neither is the team at Pagoda West, and the rest of the game artists and designers that have worked on this. This game is a fan project blown up to unprecedented proportions thanks to official Sega funding and distribution, and the result is the highest rated Sonic game for the past fifteen years, heralded by many as the Blue Blur's final, triumphant return to form after decades of confused games that vary in quality.

Of course, that's what people say. We don't know yet, one way or the other, for certain - Kotor (the big Sega fanboy of the two of us), is very grumpy about the delays to the PC version of Sonic Mania that's kept him from getting to actually experience the game, and he's operating with his head in the sand as he tries to avoid spoilers. Maybe that's why it's taken us a week longer than we'd hoped to get this video finished.

This is our longest video to date, and, as always, there are a few things that we wish were a little tidier in this, but we had to tell this story from the moment we first heard about this game. We got excited, straight off the bat, when we saw a photo of Christian Whitehead and his incredible rockstar hair, so that's pretty much formed the basis of this video. As we delved into the development of the game, though, things just got more and more interesting. It's a real rags-to-riches story for a group of Sonic fans who went from making amateur side projects to being able to release a full, glorious official game in the series, and it's wonderful to think of what this means, not just for the future of Sonic, but for fans everywhere who have aspirations to create works based on their favourite games.

If you'd like to know more about the development of Sonic Mania, here are our points of research for this video:

http://gamecritics.com/christopher-floyd/interview-with-pagoda-wests-jared-kasl-and-tom-fry/ http://www.tssznews.com/2016/07/31/teekly-world-news-interviewed-christian-whitehead-about-sonic-mania/ http://powerupgaming.co.uk/2015/04/02/sonic-the-hedgehog-3-remastered-interview/ http://powerupgaming.co.uk/2015/03/25/sonic-the-hedgehog-remastered-interview-with/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K6hU14wero/

If you liked this video and you wish we could do these more often, you're not alone! We want to be making these more frequently as possible, and we're only able to do what we do thanks to our wonderful supporters on Patreon, so please do feel free to chip in a buck or two a month to help us be able to devote more time to these videos: http://patreon.com/videogamestorytime/

Otherwise, feel free to follow us on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/BretonStriped/ and https://twitter.com/KotorComics/

Music by Broke for Free, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license: https://brokeforfree.bandcamp.com/album/petal

Anyway, thanks for watching, we really appreciate it, and whether you're a big Sonic fan or not, we hope you got something out of this story!

BretonStripes and Kotor

PS: Kotor has now played most of Mania on a friend's Switch and absolutely loves it! He's thinking of making a review video of sorts talking about nostalgia in games, is that something you'd want to see or does it stretch too far from our focus here?

PPS: This video has been flagged as inappropriate for some advertisers, so we need to get to 1000 views as quickly as possible to get YouTube to review it. Any help you can give sharing it around would be amazing!

PPPS: Crisis averted, we've been reviewed and the video is no longer flagged as inappropriate. YouTube is a funny place at the best of times.