The Sonic 3, 20th Anniversary & Knuckles Thread

Just in case anyone is interested in helping out, I'd like to point out the campaign isn't dead. As I said, the April edition of Retro Gamer Magazine will have an interview with Stealth which mentions the campaign. I'm also speaking to a few other journalists at the moment, including the BBC. Of course, none of these may to push the campaign to 10K (let alone 100K). However, "success" isn't going to come from one action. It's going to be from lots of small action that build up over time.

I appreciate the realistic posts, but I don't think they need to be repeated so often, as everyone knew the feasibility of the campaign from the start. Yes, it has a small chance of succeeding. But so did Sonic CD Remastered and Taxman not only pulled that off (even after Sega Europe turned him down), but went on to remaster Sonic 1 & 2. Let's not forget that Taxman was an unknown developer* and yet Sega gave him their most important IP. That's the very definition of achieving the impossible.

_{*I don't mean any disrespect to Taxman, but as I understand it, Sonic CD was the first big name title he worked on, which just adds more weight to his achievements}

 

Shenmue 3 and a Sonic 3 conversion don't exactly require the same kind of budget. SEGA doesn't risk much on this one.

 

Dude, there are like ten times more OH MAN WE MADE SOME INCREMENTAL PROGRESS posts than there are realistic posts.

 

Huh? I have no serious clue what you're referring to Falk, but updating Sonic 1 and 2 to be compatible with the versions of Android and iOS shouldn't be that hard yet they are being left to rot.

I don't feel that the best versions of Sonic 1 and 2 deserve to be left behind like how Sonic 4 is now.

 

I was referring more to the entitlement and the inability to grasp that maybe some people out of a crowd are just indifferent about the matter.

I mean, we had honest-to-God legit suggestions about spamming the petition on youtube comments, etc. earlier in the thread. THAT does not a good petition/campaign make.

Spoiler

SEGA

Yes I know it's kind of a low-hanging fruit punching bag right about now.

 

I've got nothing against the realistic posts, just the ones that repeat the same message.
The other realistic posts have actually done an excellent good job of weeding out some of the more "over-excited" suggestions (especially the ideas that involved spamming). If it wasn't for these types of realistic posts, the campaign would be nothing more than an annoyance.

I agree the Incremental Progress posts can be overdone. But in a campaign like this, there is only going to be incremental progression.

 

I never said there was no interest in the remasters.

I said there was no interest in Sonic 3 Remastered.

While it may be generally regarded as being the best game in the series by the fanbase, most people (I.e. not the fanbase) only played 1 & 2 back in the day. A lot of those buying the remasters are doing so on nostalgia; Sonic 3 is unknown to them, and you may as well be trying to petition Lucky Dime Caper Remastered.

(I'd love Lucky Dime Caper Remastered.)

 

Temperature is rising a bit, I see. But hey, it's good that everyone is honest with his feelings "overall" and "current" feelings about the situation and the progress. I fully understand big smile, that reading the same thing for X time can be a bit annoying, but I also understand many voices about some doubts (I feel a bit ashamed, but I share some of them). But anyway, I'm not giving up yet />

I'm trying to negotiate with arhn.eu still, I had a response (positive!), but there is no news/article yet, I've written e-mail and we shall see what will be next. I will also write to gram.pl, it's another quite big polish website about video games (probably the "last big", but not so popular as gamezilla and polygamia, probably that's why I forgot about this one).

 

You could well be right (Sonic 1 and 2 were more widely known), but I don't think we're quite at that point yet. And pessimism is frankly pretty natural for this franchise, a feeling I understand. Much as we wished we were, we're nowhere near the size of say, Mario's audience now. Even in the 90s we only surpassed that for a short time in one market (the US), mostly with pack in sales from Sonic 1 and 2. I do recognize that reality.

Again, I have some thoughts on approaches from this point onward, but I guess I'll keep them quiet for now. Let me again reiterate that while I think videos and video producers hold good potential for the campaign, I never advocated nor intended that we spammed anyone's comments section (not sure if that was aimed at me or not.)

 

Congratulations, everyone! We've just hit 7K! Let's keep up the pace!

 

This. A thousand times this. I came in to this thread and saw all of the negative posts and arguments and I was about to post my opinion but then I thought; what I'm about to post is going to be negative. It's going to call out certain posters and I'm then going to be engaged in arguments with them for several hours which is just going to be negative, eventually lead nowhere and fail to positively contribute to the campaign. Essentially all of my potential thoughts were all negative so as Aerosol said I came to his conclusion and just stayed out of it.

The crux of what infuriated me about those negative posts is that there are members here who have positively contributed to this campaign. Big Smile is the campaign's lifeline. Stealth's efforts were a massive boost and pretty much the reason we even got anywhere in the first place. Then there's my own efforts to generate press attention which involved hours of work over multiple nights. And then there's several members who have posted lengthy and time consuming posts adding their own positive thoughts and ideas. That energy is positive. It drives the campaign forward.

So what made me angry was other members who I'm not going to name to evade arguments here who have literally contributed nothing to this campaign who just show up with their drive by negative posts damning the efforts of everyone here. All that achieves is it disheartens those who are actually working on this campaign and then brings the campaign to a stall because people then contemplate the notion of just giving up. Again I'm not going to name names; but what is the point in contributing nothing outside of a drive by negative one liner saying all of this is pointless, we should abandon the campaign and there is no hope whatsoever in continuing with our efforts?

Sorry but if you've done absolutely nothing to contribute then you are not in a position to dictate the direction of this campaign. This doesn't apply to everyone. The vast majority of the members here have positively contributed. I'm only referring to the last few pages or so. And as for Big Smile and I posting "Incremental progress updates"; if we hadn't done that and kept you guys consistently updated this thread would have been dormant for two months. Yeah so not every update we post is going to be "We got an article on IGN" but those updates are still important because it keeps people informed, it keeps the campaign alive and it keeps the momentum going. Those updates were positive, not negative.

If you want to contribute post about where you think we should go from here. Ideas on how to proceed. A discussion about that would be positive.

 

I agree - cynicism will get us nowhere. Not that anything we say will stop people coming in here from time to time telling us why it's not realistic, but the thing is, I think we all know that. It hasn't been a "realistic" possibility since SEGA rejected Taxman & Stealth's prototype, before any of us even knew about it. We know our efforts may well be in vain, but we're committed to trying, anyway. It's okay to criticize when people suggest spamming, or doing other things that would make the campaign look bad. But don't criticize us for making progress, for being committed. At best, you'll be ignored, and at worst, it'll lead us into an off-track bicker-fest. We appreciate your realism and tempered expectations, and speaking for myself, I agree with a lot of it, but we're still going to try.

Anyway, I could probably make a second trailer with a greater focus on Sonic 3 itself and why we consider it to be such a great title. Could even address the fact that it's been re-released so often, but this is different... lead that into what the remasters are, the features, the petition, etc.

 

Your work is of a really high standard, so that would be excellent!

 

If you're referring to me, this is literally what I posted

Regardless of what you may or may not think, that's the hard fact. I'm telling you this based on having seen machinations of no less than three publishers, while actually working on a contract basis on everything from indie to AAA games both from Japan and the western world. Stealth has basically said things along the same lines earlier in the project.

If you're going to get discouraged, that's on you.

If you want to 'call me out' on it and 'engage in hours long discussions', fine I'm willing to play ball. But don't put words in my mouth.

(Shenmue 3 -is- a doomed endeavor though. Nothing short of the 3rd Coming of Jesus is going to change that)

 

There's a difference between being realistic and being negative. We're not saying "this campaign is never going to get results". We're saying "this campaign isn't going to get results with the way it's currently going".

And while it's not much, criticizing is still contributing. Instead of complaining about people telling you that it's not going well, try to make the campaign go better. Cause you're not likely going to get this done with "we'll get a reasonable amount of supporters in a year" as your train of thought. We wouldn't be saying this if the campaign was going well.

 

PowerUpGaming interview. This time with Taxaman.

Taxman talks about Hidden Palace:

 

I must've said the same thing at least twice in the thread earlier myself. Most players never bought or had access to Sonic 3, (Was it ever bundled with the Genesis/Megadrive before hardware clones?) including myself as a kid, for as badly I wanted it; still don't have a real cart. Whereas you were hard pressed to find a Genesis owner without a Sonic 2 cart stating "Not For Resale" sitting in their stack of games.

We need something more than nostalgia to budge this hype train, I agree on that. IGN posting an article was nice, but the other sites haven't hopped aboard yet, and you can tell it in the number of signatures. If Shantae, a series with an obviously far lower profile and fan following than Sonic, could have a more-than-successful Kickstarter, I don't see why a signature campaign, with no money involved whatsoever, for a twenty year old game can't take off.

 

Intriguing that Sonic Team disliked the original HPZ, though it makes some sense. It was pretty undeveloped (few gimmicks and still in it's basic layout). While it's a shame it was altered from the beta, it makes sense since all the other levels were too for similar smoother optimisation purposes. Wonder if the old team like the new variant.

I must say though that the Eggman boss is FAR from forgiving, especially with the mobile touchscreen controls.

 

Also, I felt that it drags for way too long... You have to wait a lot for getting a chance to land a hit. =\