Why Sega Loves Fan Games
Channel: Video Game Story Time
Date: 2020-06-05

While Nintendo is wholly opposed to the concept, Sega has a very relaxed attitude towards fangames. A hugely successful collaboration with fans including Christian Whitehead and Simon Thomley on Sonic Mania have helped Sega to develop an eagerness to see what fans create, but this is only part of the story.

A few weeks ago, we made a video about how Nintendo fears that fan works will "threaten" their intellectual property, and so they bring the hammer down hard on any fan game they think will generate competition with one of their upcoming games.

Now, it's time for the other side of the coin: why Sega has embraced fan games and the fan community in such a unique way.

Now that the preamble is out of the way, it's time for some wild speculation. It's currently 9:23pm on Friday 5th May. We firmly believe that some time in the next week, Sega is going to unveil a spiritual successor to Sonic Mania. Some kind of new Sonic game, with Christian Whitehead involved in some way. It may not be Sonic Mania 2, but it'll be something in that ilk. A logical title might be Sonic Discovery, but only since Sonic Mania was originally called Discovery when Christian and team pitched the game to Sega.

Why do we think this? Well, through researching this video, we've found that Sega has been praising Christian Whitehead more than ever in the past few weeks. Sega has also started ramping up their social media presence, hosting livestreams and Reddit AMAs, as if gearing up for a big marketing push.

We suspect that this secret Sonic game was going to be revealed today, as part of IGN's Summer of Gaming, but as the event has been postponed until next week, the game is still a secret.

We're fully prepared to be wrong about this, which is why we're not exactly putting any of this speculation into a video, but we wanted to write it out so that, in the off chance that we're correct, there's detailed proof of it. We won't edit this text if we're wrong, and you can just take it as a sign that we don't know what we're talking about.

Anyway, we love you, we hope you're keeping safe.

See you next week,
BretonStripes (http://twitter.com/bretonstriped) and Kotor (http://twitter.com/kotorcomics)

Sources:
https://twinfinite.net/2016/05/inside-the-mastermind-an-interview-with-sonic-the-hedgehogs-twitter-manager/
https://www.destructoid.com/sega-gives-sonic-fans-the-okay-to-make-games-386389.phtml
https://www.polygon.com/2016/2/8/10756318/sonic-the-hedgehog-great-rocky-history 
https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/go02cw/im_ivo_gerscovich_chief_brand_officer_for_sonic/frdizbd/?context=3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5B01rQv7VZA
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/sega-shuts-down-streets-of-rage-remake 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt5i4XEqKrI