The Sonic 3, 20th Anniversary & Knuckles Thread

Hmm, perhaps former Voice Actors who aren't currently employed with SEGA in anyway and have a love for the franchise can help?

I know 1 person comes to mind, Ryan Drummond.

 

That would be a neat.

I had a feeling that him being currently employed with them might be a problem but I decided to ask anyway, just to see.

 

I'd suggest not bothering to personally contact anyone with even that level of direct affiliation with SEGA. You can't expect them to act contrary to the company's apparent wishes; no one who is in any way dependent on SEGA for employment is going to want to have anything to do with this

For all I can tell, based on the website, the letter campaign only has 14 supporters, and there are barely any more than 2,500 signatures on the petition. This is nowhere near the level of support we're going to need to really convince anybody, so besides not asking SEGA employees for support they can't give, now wouldn't be the time to contact anyone for the purpose of getting them to make an inside push, either, no matter who they are. At least one person has already tried to direct Iizuka to the campaign via facebook. Stop that. 2,500 might look like a big number, but to these people it's a joke, and the last thing we need is for influential person to actually notice something like that and try to shut this down before it really gets started

The Haruki Satomi letter aspect of the campaign, for similar reasons, would benefit greatly from a sudden and massive increase in support. If he's already received those 14 letters and only those 14, they've probably gone into the trash and won't be taken into account when more letters finally arrive. Consider gaining higher support before turning in further letters, or even sending all of the letters to one central location until enough have been collected to make an impact, and then forwarding them along all at once

Otherwise, just stick to contacting fans and unaffiliated media, or just being patient. It will take a while to get highly noticed, and it will take a while to get an appropriate number of actual supporters, but it can be done if handled properly

 

I agree, I think the best course of action would be to have all letters sent to one of the people heading the campaign, then having that person mail said letters when they have enough. Probably throw in a stamp and extra envelope inside to minimize work for said person. I think this way the campaign would be more precise and have great control on how things play forward.

That's probably the best idea. I also agree, don't contact people who work at SEGA to support the campaign, like Stealth said, they won't.

 

About the letters:
I was speaking to JT (the guy who gave us feedbacK) last week and mentioned the campaign take-up. He said letters aren't to demonstrate quantities. Companies forget about projects, but having a few letters arrive to an office on a semi-regular basis reminds them about the project . If the letter contains something usual, then it becomes part of office chitchat. The more often a project is talked about internally, the more perceived value it gains.

Plus, companies know that for every person who sends in a letter, there's probably several more who agree with them but just didn't get around to writing in. (With online petitions, it's the other way around: A lot of companies assume that a percentage of signups aren't genuine). Most companies don't keep the letters, so they can't count the quantity. It's more about the feeling it creates.

JT knows of several instances where just 20 letters were enough to make a company reconsider a project.

However, JT has always said that he hasn't dealt with Sega and that companies have their own culture. Stealth obviously knows more about Sega culture, so I am happy to suspend the letters, if he thinks Sega will take a quantity view. I am just posting this information so there is no misunderstanding. Let me know and I can update accordingly.

For the signature campaign:
Sega responded to #SegaPCPorts, which is currently at 14K. Their success came from fans tweeting Polygon and Kotaku about the campaign. I think we should try that. If everyone follows Polygon and Kotaku and sends only 1 tweet each, then I don't think it would be classed as spamming. Any Thoughts? (And lets wait for some thoughts before tweeting).

 

Personally I think it's a bad idea to suspend the letters, we have this all set up just so we start putting road blocks for people who want to join in. If we start turning on our selves what chance do we have making this work.

Because there have been only 14 letters sent I have to say this that people in here who want Sonic 3 Remastered to become a reality who haven't sent a letter yet need to put the effort in and post one. We all need to play a part in this as we won't get another chance. If this fails that means interest to do it again will be put off as many of us will think it's a waste of time.

 

I don't think suspending is the right thing. I just think we need control of all the information, just blindly allowing people to send letters isn't going to do much. You got to understand, running a campaign like this has to be more about fans just asking for a new game. It has to get the largest amount of attention and getting 1 letter a week doesn't mean anything. Gathering them all, getting post on major sites and a bunch of letters within a small span of a month, will get you more noticed.

It has to be more coordinated.

Have friends that write for blogs other than mobile that would love to talk about this but since its being focused on mobile they don't feel it fits their blogs. Shame.

 

It's not mobile focused. Haruki Satomi is the head of Sega Networks, but he's also a senior in all the other Sega departments. And from April 1st, he'll be in charge of the new Sega Games which will control mobile, console and PC.


Regarding the letters: We're going to have make some changes in March anyway, because Sega Networks won't exist in April. Maybe it would be best to keep them coming in and then phase it out/rework it in mid-March.

 

So according to you guys, we can't advertise on places where groups of Sega fans are potentially congregating, we can't directly contact people at Sega individually, and we have just wait for the signature count to go up. Where is the momentum supposed to come from without groundswell?

 

We said no to Twitch chats because that would become a complete mess. Also contacting people directly from SEGA, like I tried with Mike Pollock yesterday is a pointless endeavor because there are legal problems involved (which I thought might be the case but tried anyway. I shouldn't do these things at night :v: )

Anyway we have to keep pushing this sight through other avenues at the time being. Keep trying to get this onto other gaming and news sites. Finalize all the stuff for the livestream. Just keep going at it. Don't give up because now we have a longer way to go. It'll work. Just keep going.

 

It's the semi-regularity that I'm concerned with. There doesn't seem to be any more regularity at all at the moment. You're basically saying the same thing I am, there needs to be a steady influx, which is why I think it's relatively useless for a single individual to randomly send a letter during what's otherwise a period of silence. Unless we can guarantee that steady stream, gathering a bulk of mails would be the next-best thing. I had imagined that anyone sending a letter to the common location would include a separate envelope with their own return address so that it will still seem less like a single person is bulk-mailing them, and if slow and steady is what you want, they can still be sent one-by-one once a large number has been gathered to ensure that there's no downtime that might interfere with the campaign's impact

The release of any other SEGA game on PC can't be cited as precedence in this case for a few reasons

• I haven't followed the campaign, so I'm not absolutely certain that this is the case, but the simple fact that any game was released while the campaign was in progress is meaningless as it can't be proven that SEGA wasn't already planning to do that particular port in the first place. They would need to specifically announce that they are responding to the petition, and even if they did, there's no true guarantee that the announcement isn't a PR stunt staged to take advantage of a coincidence, as we have recent experience with Sega America PR reps saying strange and untrue things to make fans happy (Ex: "Yeah Lost World is based on X-Treme because its awesome and we wanted to bring it back"-SoA "What? I don't even know what a Sonic X-Treme is" - SoJ)
• It seems that the games people are asking for are more modern and therefore very likely to be easily portable due to primarily using a high-level language such as C rather than assembly. This would mostly be a matter of taking the game logic and data wholesale and replacing the I/O code, rather than performing conversions on every single piece and rewriting all game logic from scratch as in the case of the Sonic remasters
• There is, in fact, a legal issue regarding Sonic 3, whereas there likely is no such issue with the other games that people are requesting for PC, and as such, it's more than a simple matter of reminding them of a cash cow. In this case, they need to be either intensely motivated to resolve the issue so that the game can be released unmodified, or assured that any modified form of the game will still be well-received under the circumstances. Because of that, we need the numbers for them to really take notice in any useful way. Related - consider for a moment that because of a leak at GDC, you were already aware that we were going to do Sonic 2 before we had begun working on it and indeed, before Sonic 1 itself was even finished. Would it not stand to reason that there might be some strong inhibiting factor that prevented us from securing the third game along with the first two?

The final point is what frustrates me, personally, about the fact that the legal issue is still listed under the "Rumors" section of the campaign site and that a point was made to refer to it as "unclear", and the fact that the issue isn't mentioned at all on the petition, and that could be a fatal mistake - if SEGA can't or is for some reason entirely unwilling to overcome the legal issue, and they can confidently say that it can't be proven that a sufficient number of signatures were made with an awareness that the game may have to be modified, it will probably end up being completely useless

 

Yes, we can do that. I'll look into getting an address for people to send it to. However, the letter campaign generated much less of a response than I hoped (I estimated we would get at least 25 responses from the Retro forums alone, but we struggled to get 5). So I am not especially hopefully for a large bulk response. Plus with Sega Networks moving in April, I think it might be better just to let the letter writing campaign fade. I'll still look into getting a shared address.

It is actually mentioned on the petition. It's in the "letter to Sega" section (You have to click Read more). However, I have updated the petition to make it more prominent.

I have updated the website to remove it from the Rumours section. Please let me know if any more changes need to be made.

 

They're looking better; the promptness is very much appreciated!

I don't have any other clear thoughts on how to improve the campaign at the moment, but I'll try giving it some more thought

 

Hi. Yeah I will be in the race! I'm not as good with S3&K as I am with Sonic 2 so I don't expect to do that well. Nevertheless it'll raise awareness of the campaign so I don't mind at all. I can also do a video and TSSZ article when the time is near.

I also wrote up a TSSZ article about the 2,500 signature goal being reached so that should help draw in some attention as well. =)

 

Just to re-iterate so that there's no confusion, it's not a goal, it's a "milestone" (read- change.org being stupid). The way they handle milestones is extremely misleading because both forms of the "needed" section (which flip-flops on showing the "goal" for some reason) are written in such a way that it appears to be saying that this will be the ultimate goal of the petition, and a lot of people have acted on this incorrect information by posting about how close the petition is to reaching its "goal", posting about the "goal" being "reached", and probably even showing apathy due to a misconception of just how many signatures would be necessary to actually make an impact

It needs to be made very clear - we only stand a real chance of success in this case if we can prove that SEGA will at the very, absolute and utmost least, break even on funding the entire process, even in the case that parts of the game have to be changed to get around legal issues. To do that, we will upward of 100,000 people (or preferably more) to say "yes we will buy at least one copy of this thing regardless of whether or not legally-disputed content gets changed". They're going to want to turn a profit, so if they aren't confident that they at least won't lose anything, there's no reason for them to bother trying


Also, I might as well also confirm that I'm still planning on participating in the stream

 

Right. I also didn't know that change.org automatically updates the milestones either. It seems I underestimated how much the site works and what their policies are. Oh well. I'll keep this all in mind.

 

At the time of this post there are 2,580 signatures. To the members who have contacts with some of the Youtubers, can we have them make a video about this campaign on their respective channels? That would be a great way to help boost signatures as we await further info on the livestream and coverage from other sites.

 

That sounds like the best way to organize the letters, while keeping it organic. Personally, I see the online signature campaign as a tool to open discussion, while also encouraging more people to hop aboard with physical letters, and the more of those, the better. I recall Nintendo said once that each signature in online petitions doesn't equal a sale in all cases. (Meat puppets are good at spoofing results, such as one person encouraging his friends to inflate his single vote by 10 with their own.) This is why Project Moonfall, a petition for a Majora's Mask HD remake, was a bust. They felt more like a Wind Waker HD project anyway.

SEGA of America may operate different from Nintendo, and as you've said before, Stealth, there's no knowing what their company culture is like on the inside either. The letters still sound like the best bet to easing any doubts they might have about re-releasing the game, with the petition itself complimenting it by providing an idea of how many people see Sonic 3 as an exception to the usual chastising that remakes get for changing music.

 

About the SEGA PC ports campaign: while it got the attention of SEGA's community managers and people from Platinum Games, as far as I know it hasn't made SEGA do more PC ports. Their most recent PC port, that of Valkyria Chronicles, was in development before the start of the campaign.