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Retro Sonic

From Sonic Retro

Retrosonic title.png
Retro Sonic
Latest version: Nexus 2008 Demo
Latest release date: Nexus 2008
Engine: Original, C++/DirectX
Credits: The Taxman

Retro Sonic was a fan game project by Christian "The Taxman" Whitehead which would, later on, become the Retro Engine.

History

The earliest incarnation of this game was created using Multimedia Fusion and not much about it is known.

Quickly realizing MMF's limitations, Taxman started bringing the engine over to Visual Basic which, along with the usage of the Direct X API, resulted in a better performance and allowed for more graphical effects. In 2002, he released a demo that included a few playable Zones, Egg Garden Zone, Dust Hill Zone (Past and Present), and Warehouse Zone, along with a Special Stage. The demo was received very well and he continued to make some updates to it before switching to another programming language.

This time, the engine was rewritten into the C++ using the existing code present in the Visual Basic version. Soon after, however, the project was put in hiatus for more than a year due to his loss of interest. After Taxman looked back at the project, he realized he wasn't happy with certain aspects of the game like the messiness of the coding, the bugs, and the tile collision. This, along with requests for multiplayer, something that would have required an immense rework of the engine, led to him scrapping this incarnation altogether.

Now created from scratch, the newest incarnation was programmed to be flexible, allowing for it to be ported easily to other platforms.[1] In 2006, he created a proof of concept that showed Retro Sonic running on the Dreamcast. One year later, a Windows demo of the game was released for the year's Sonic Amateur Games Expo. It featured Egg Garden Zone and a custom rebuild of Sonic 2's Emerald Hill Zone.

Merging plans

In 2008, there were plans to merge the game with Sonic XG, forming Retro Sonic XG. The levels of Retro Sonic would be adapted to the XG style and added to the game.

In March of 2011, The Taxman announced that Retro Sonic XG had merged again in early-2010, this time with the fan game Sonic Nexus, becoming Retro Sonic Nexus. While some zones from Nexus and Retro would have been present and adapted into the XG style, some would have not made the cut due to their similar themes.

Cancellation

In Mid-2011, Taxman posted an update on his blog, stating that he had become busy working on a title set to release later that year,[2] which was later revealed to be the 2011 port of Sonic CD. The port was made using an updated version of Retro Sonic's engine, now officially titled the Retro Engine. Following the success of the Sonic CD port, Taxman was commissioned to port Sonic 1, followed by Sonic 2, over to Android and iOS. This resulted in the Retro Sonic Nexus project being held indefinitely. The RSDK ended up unreleased to the public and was only used for all future Sonic games made with the Retro Engine.

Zones

The old website of Retro Sonic reveals that, before the merge, Taxman had planned for the fan game to have 12 zones with three acts each. [3]

  • Egg Garden Zone
  • Dust Hill Zone
  • Sparkling Zone
  • Hidden Palace Zone
  • Crown Casino Zone
  • Genocide Zone
  • Scrambled Egg Zone
  • Volcanic Tower Zone
  • Sky Plaza Zone
  • Cosmic Gadget Zone
  • Steel Cortex Zone
  • Dreampool Zone

Downloads

Download.svg Download Retro Sonic
File: Retro Sonic (Beta).7z (3.18 MB) (info)
Current version: SAGE 2007 Beta

Older versions

References

External links

References