Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 Being Remade by Fans

Fans are taking on a seemingly impossible task by trying to turn Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 into something resembling a playable game. 

For those who don’t know, 2006’s Sonic the Hedgehog was an awful game. Even if you’re willing to ignore the many, many bad decisions made when designing the game’s levels, plot, and characters, you’re still left with the kind of technical mess that should have never been let out of a major game studio. The game’s camera has been rightfully nominated as one of the absolute worst in the history of video games, and the number of glitches in the final release rendered it legitimately unplayable at times. 

A developer by the name of ChaosX has gotten a few people together in an effort to remake Sonic 2006. The project has been in development for a few years, but it wasn’t until the reveal of a recent demo that people realized just how far along the project has come. 

The demo reveals a version of Sonic 2006 that isn’t perfect but does appear to be remarkably playable. Its camera is certainly much better than the one featured in the original game and little details like the character movements and visuals are clearer than they’ve ever been before. Simply put, it looks like an actual game rather than the trainwreck moving at Sonic speed that was the original version of this title. 

That’s all great, but the hard truth of the matter in this instance may be that there’s only so much these fans can do to rescue Sonic 2006 unless they’re willing to perform a Resident Evil 2-style remake of the original game. There are problems with that game that go deeper than a few technical shortcomings. Actually, some of the problems extend to 3D Sonic games in general (which is one of the reasons why Sonic Mania was such a welcome departure from the modern). 

Still, it will certainly be nice to see one of Sonic’s most shameful adventures be turned into something resembling an actual game. There’s no word on when this project may be finished, but you can download the latest build of the remake if you’re interested in checking out this remake.

Matthew Byrd is a staff writer for Den of Geek. He spends most of his days trying to pitch deep-dive analytical pieces about Killer Klowns From Outer Space to an increasingly perturbed series of editors. You can read more of his work here or find him on Twitter at @SilverTuna014.