Dream on, Eggman. There's no way this is canon. ^^ I'm happy to assist if someone wants to make a proper page for this stuff! Sonic Channel artwork such as wallpapers, calendars, and the Sonic Pict series can be found here and here. So, technically, we've got it covered. I messed up at first and uploaded everything to Retro CDN instead of Sonic Retro.
But we're an encyclopedia, not (just?) a culture. We can't let our definitions and processes change with every editor. That's why the wiki defaults to the term Mega Drive over Genesis: we had to pick the one most familiar to the largest global audience. By extension, we should be treating our style and formatting the same way, and here's what the major style guides have to say. Chicago (US): outside (2017) Oxford (UK): inside (2016) Cambridge (UK): outside (202x) MLA (US): outside (2022) Harvard (US): outside (2017?) MHRA (UK): outside (2024) It's... really only Oxford. Which is where I'd imagine the impression of a US/UK cultural divide comes from. I understand Oxford is probably the foundation for much of the modern UK's grammar rules (like Chicago is to the US), but from my perspective you have to look at the numbers. Oxford is really the only style guide doing it, and I'm struggling to find any other major English-language style guides which recommend it. Maybe it's more prevalent in the UK than it appears. Think of it like this: we don't allow for sections to be named "External Links" simply because an editor's culture uses capitalization more. We sometimes do that for spelling, but we really shouldn't do it for style and formatting. Short of me researching citation marker placement OUTSIDE the English language (please no), I can't see the justification in doing anything else. That being said, I'm down to treat this as a color/colour difference Just know I will be scratching your name off the official kiss list.
I've always done it this way too... but because it always seemed the right thing to do and without realising that there are style guides for these things (also because before Sega Retro I'd never edited a wiki in my life)... but I've also done it the other way because I've seen others do it and in these matters I'm not very good at it so I tend to "follow the leader" or be "Roman when I'm in Rome" (read "do as others do")... what matters is that we all get on well with each other...
So everyone knows of these infamous Pakistan McDonald's Happy Meal Sonic Heroes ads. And it turned out that a Big ad went undocumented for like 20 years and was just found. Enjoy Pakistani Big, fellas.
I hope these models still exist on a hard drive somewhere Gordon The Freeman 3: Gordon The Freeman & G-Man
Does anyone actually know where the complete and utterly baseless claims of "Sonic 4 started out as a mobile game" and "Sonic Unleashed had a higher budget than any other Sonic game" originated from? Because there's absolutely zero proof for either as far as I can tell, yet it seems like 99% of this community believes in both completely uncritically.
There's a graphic in episode 1 that says "Sonic The Portable", which apparently was an actual thing Sega was developing before it became Sonic 4.
That's not much evidence. The console/PC version has a ton of high-definition assets that are nowhere to be seen in the mobile version (including this very ferris wheel!), so there's absolutely no way that the mobile version came first. Unless the developers were really, really, really overestimating what 2010 smartphones were capable of.
They could have just... made those assets after it was decided that the game should be on consoles too?
That and the additional gimmick acts for Casino Street and Lost Labyrinth that were replaced on PC/console releases (aside from Wii). The tilting controls required for those acts are really awkward outside of a smartphone form factor, so it's strange that they were the original intended acts for all releases (as of the PartnerNET proto) if the game wasn't originally geared towards smartphones.
I hear your points, but I still don't think that this is sufficient proof to claim that the game was meant to be mobile exclusive with a 100% certainty. We're veering dangerously close towards "I bet that the desert level was Dust Hill" -territory here. Even the game's Wikipedia page makes this claim, yet gives no source.
IIRC there's no spoken statements of Iizuka or anyone that worked on Sonic 4 that said it was originally a mobile game. But the background of Casino Street calling it "Sonic the Portable", the game engine (and Sonic's model in the iOS version) being reused from Sonic Rush, the phone-based gimmick acts being in the 360 PartnerNET protos, and the controls of the special stage seemingly based around rotating the phone should tell you more than enough to believe there's credence to the idea. There's also another iOS-specific quirk that wasn't in console releases: the camera following Sonic around loops. Maybe not as convincing, but a sign that the original project may have started here while all following releases are where the project saw changes/refinements. And sure, I give no "proof". But this isn't something that feels baseless or dubious with material we already have, like the "Dust Hill" situation did. It's a pretty well founded conclusion to take.
To be fair its pretty fuckin obvious to anyone with a brain that dust hill obviously means a desert level unless you think sonic was gojna likr explore a really really dusty house or something in which case why would it be a hill????? i rest my case edit: i was drunk when i posted this i dont know what was going through my mind
Doing just a little surface level digging on this Sonic 4 thought, my go to thought is "Kevin Eva would probably have said something about Sonic 4 at some point" so I dug around for that but only really found the same stuff Source Gaming did, so I'm gonna be echoing a little. While Kevin doesn't say if it ever had any other title, he does seem to imply it was intended to be a test to see if episodic content would work even from a WIP standpoint in a tweet in a thread talking about the history of "What the fans want", and that "Someone" decided it should be Sonic 4 (Shocking news, I know!) Then we have a Nintendo Life interview with Ken Balough from just before Sonic 4 was set to release, where he essentially claims it was Sonic 4 "From the start" and "Just made sense". Then you have an earlier interview with Jun Senoue for Nintendo Power, reposted by Sonic Stadium, where he said they knew it was going to be a Classic Sonic game, but didn't know if it was going to be Sonic 4 yet. From this point, I'm in a bit of a dead end where there's a link to the TCRF page for Sonic 4 showing the Sonic the Portable sign, which sources this Hardcore Gaming 101 article from Kurt Kalata, which doesn't seem to source anything, and then also another post from the "I like Sonic 4" thread that has an excerpt from what looks like it's from a Wiki page I can't find also citing the Hardcore Gaming 101 article. I did find what seems to be the first instance of anyone connecting the dots on "Sonic the Portable", though - a NeoGAF post from 2016 by user RK128. As well as claims Sonic 1's code name was Needmouse. This seems like a really fun mess to sort out and find sources for. But I don't think we're entirely wrong with what seems to be widespread assumptions, because when you look at the quotes from the start, that seems to be the story being told here, with "Sonic the Portable" only really being where the project started before quickly shifting towards being Sonic 4 using assets they already made.
Stealth said he heard about Sonic 4 originally being a mobile game in this interview: (38:29) As far as Sonic 4 goes, that was actually developed to be mobile game initially and from what I've heard it was somebody at Sega America says I want a game called Sonic 4 so with this other with this mobile game in development already they just said okay we'll just call this one Sonic 4 Granted, he didn’t say where he heard this, but I assume it would be at his time at Sega. And it lines up with all the other sources.
Excellent. This is the kind of stuff I wanted to see. I think we should put this on the Wiki, but obviously preface it with "According to Simon Thomley" and cite that interview.
People have compared S4E1's physics to Rush's. This makes me wonder. Has anyone went into 4's code and compared it to Rush's?
