Sonic Mania is packed with gameplay touches and Easter eggs to make it a fitting ode to the blue blur’s 2D origins. But for the Mania development team, those nods were never included just for the sake of it.
“Our approach to references was always 'game first,' including them only when they aligned with Zone gimmicks/decorations/locations that we had already planned,” game director Christian Whitehead said in an email interview with IGN.
Reflecting on the game’s success and fans’ reactions to Sonic Mania since its launch, Whitehead noted how the response to Studiopolis' reveal in 2016 “spurred us on further to have fun with these deep cuts.” These “deep cuts” still had to make sense to the fiction of the world, though. So despite Whitehead jokingly suggesting Axel from Streets of Rage early on, he knew the character’s human look didn’t mesh with the rest of the game.
Some references that do fit in the context of the world take center stage in Sonic Mania, though, like Chemical Plant Act 2’s Mean Bean Machine boss fight.
“The Mean Bean Machine boss was probably the most complex boss to create, since it was essentially a game within a game,” Whitehead explained. “I spent some time researching the rules of the game and replicated them in the engine, getting the core chain mechanic and scoring system working.”
While Whitehead said at first the boss’ design “was a really dumb random input generator,” the help of the team’s programmer Hunter Bridges led to a more robust AI, which allowed them to even include Mean Bean Machine as an unlockable mode.
Whitehead was "not really expecting [the boss] to get approval from Sonic Team, since it was a different license, but they thought the idea was funny" and looked into helping Whitehead make it gel with the Chemical Plant world.
“The 'Amoeba Droid' chemical mini boss in Act 1 was already an evolution on the type of boss the original Sonic 2 Zone had, so Act 2's boss needed to use chemicals in another way that was distinct, yet fun,” Whitehead said. “...The idea of different colored chemicals with various properties was already decided upon for Chemical Plant Act 2, so I just had a moment where it clicked and thought "What if those colored chemicals were being used to make Mean Beans?"
Similar logic came into play when implementing the “& Knuckles” meme to its “logical conclusion” as a feature, allowing players to have the echidna as a sidekick, or even play as him.
“Even better was a bug we noticed in the ending; where 3 independent Knuckleses would escape the explosion together," Whitehead said. "This bug became a feature, and we made a new 'true' ending to celebrate it with some help from the lovely Tyson Hesse."
Sonic Mania’s many secrets are owed to the depth of Sonic knowledge Whitehead said the team shared. That knowledge paid off in remixing old levels, because Whitehead said the team aimed “to surprise players, simultaneously celebrating and eschewing nostalgia to make the returning classic stages memorable for entirely different reasons.”
In the same way Whitehead and his team didn’t include Sega references that went against the context of Sonic’s world, the design of new levels also required looking “at our world through the same Classic Sonic lens” and creating something “distinct yet right at home in the Sonic universe.”
Those efforts led to a well-received Sonic entry by fans and critics, one as fun for many to play as it is to discover every hidden reference. “I think fans have done pretty well so far, but there may be one or two hiding in plain sight,” Whitehead teased of the game’s abundance of nods to the hedgehog’s history.
Sonic fans can continue to hunt down Sonic Mania’s host of Easter eggs, as the game is now available on the Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Be sure to check out IGN's Sonic Mania wiki for all of the game's secrets.
Jonathon Dornbush is an Associate Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter @jmdornbush.
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