Sonic Origins fan-made mod halted with three words: “Screw this game” [Updated]

Enlarge / Artist's interpretation of Sonic fans' impatience over a recent game's lack of updates and patches. (credit: Sega / Sam Machkovech)

Three weeks after its launch on modern consoles and PCs, the retro gaming collection Sonic Origins has continued coming under fire from various fans and critics, each uncovering issues that range from nitpicky to noticeable. Without any formal response from Sega on if or when the collection may receive a patch, one group of fans took it upon themselves to deliver their own mod on PC—only to then confirm that they were immediately halting and deleting their efforts.

The mod in question, dubbed BetterOrigins, was poised to correct apparently unfaithful elements found in the Sonic Origins versions of classic Sonic the Hedgehog games. In particular, the mod had already swapped art and sprites due to fact that some of them had been lifted from different games. (As an example, the "skidding" animation in Sonic Origins' version of Sonic 1 was actually lifted from Sonic CD, which the mod corrected.)

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  Screengrabs of the original mod update post, which have since been wiped.

But as the group of apparently three modders made progress on various art swaps and patches, the team ran at Sonic speeds into a brick wall: The game's "script" access was closed off. "After really digging into the files for this game, its [sic] become way clearer that this game is absolute shit," a modder by the name of XanmanP wrote in a post that has since been deleted. Until Sega opens up fan access to the game's scripts, he wrote, "there's not a whole lot we can 'fix' without just redoing sprites."