Sonic Origins Developer Unhappy With the Final Product, Blames Sega and Crunch

Since it was released last week, Sonic Origins has received negative feedback from fans concerning performance and glitches. Many were perplexed about how a collection of 20-year-old games could run worse on modern hardware and have more bugs than they did on the Genesis. According to Headcannon founder Simon Thomley, whose team did the remaster of Sonic 3 & Knuckles for Sonic Origins, much of the fault is due to Sega’s decisions.

Sonic 3 & Knuckles remaster studio blames Sega for Sonic Origins issues

This is frustrating. I won’t lie and say that there weren’t issues in what we gave to Sega, but what is in Origins is also not what we turned in. Integration introduced some wild bugs that conventional logic would have one believe were our responsibility- a lot of them aren’t.

— Stealth (@HCStealth) June 24, 2022

There are many issues with Sonic Origins, and the most commonly reported are visual glitches and lag. Of course, fans rightly questioned why Sega couldn’t manage to port four Genesis games to modern hardware. According to Headcannon, the studio behind Sonic Mania which was tasked with remastering Sonic 3 & Knuckles for Sonic Origins, the catalyst behind these problems is crunch and adherence to an unrealistic release schedule.

In a Twitter thread, Headcannon founder Simon Thomley stated there were issues with Sonic 3 & Knuckles when they submitted it to Sega due to the tight development turnaround. However, he claims that some of the problems with the game arose when Sega integrated it into Sonic Origins. The team asked to make fixes before launch but were unable to because the final builds had already been submitted for review by various platform holders. Headcannon also asked to delay the launch repeatedly and was rebuked.

Headcannon is prepared to offer post-release fixes and updates, but according to Thomley, Sega hasn’t committed one way or the other yet. The studio is eager to fix Sonic 3 & Knuckles and hopes it can do so soon.

As of writing, Sega hasn’t responded to Thomley’s comments.

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