Sonic 2 HD

Back in 2012, we followed the progress made on Sonic 2 HD — a fan project to remake Sega's classic platformer — with great interest. However, for personal reasons development work ground to a halt and we never heard anything more about the project. That is until now.

The team's Facebook page was recently updated to let classic Sonic fans know that the project is to be revived as a new talented programmer has come on board. New contributors are also welcomed, especially to help with animation and graphics in the unofficial HD remake.

Here's the latest post from the talented team:

Hello everyone!

The only thing more surprising than seeing an official post from us here is our announcing that S2HD is no longer dead.

You read that correctly: work has once again begun on Sonic 2 HD! That said, we'd like to give you all a brief tie-in for recent events leading to the project's reboot.

As many of you know, the leading reason behind the project's cancellation was due to the programming element being removed with no possibility of return in its existing form. As of last year, this changed. Before anyone raises the question, no, the former programmer and the S2HD team members have not had a reunion; instead, a fan of the project independently created and submitted his own engine to Vincent, the project leader, for evaluation. After integrating the art assets from the alpha release and successfully testing it, Vincent began to let the rest of the prior team members know, and we've picked up where we left off sans those who are unavailable due to real life obligations. Two other talented programmers have since offered their skills to recreate the game's physics to match the original, and to port the game to the Mac OS platform (the latter of which is still in the earliest possible stage, and we have no estimate on when it will be playable, so stay tuned!).

In response to some of the questions we have seen, the Alpha Release build is officially discontinued and will not get any form of support as we do not have the source code. The next release will be entirely new programming from the ground up.

We'll provide more details in how you can help us out in the next few days. It's good to be back!

Are you excited about the possibility of this unofficial HD remake of Sonic the Hedgehog 2, or are you more satisfied with SEGA's 2014 Sonic Boom? Perhaps you're the opposite, and see this as the perfect tonic to Sonic Boom's radical design changes? Let us know with a comment below.

[source facebook.com]