When Do Remakes Become Different Games?

Sonic The Hedgehog 2006 is one of the most infamous video games ever made — and easily the most infamous game in the Sonic The Hedgehog franchise. As somebody who did the play when he was younger — and even beat it a number of times — I’ll say that I do think the reputation is overblown — but the game is still far from good.

I mention this because a handful of programmers are currently remaking the game for PC — and making a better game in the process. This effort — dubbed Project ‘06 — has gotten much positive reception and, at time of writing, has basically reinvented the game from something hated into something liked.

However, is Project ’06 even the same game as Sonic The Hedgehog 2006? Can you just take an infamous game, make it good, and still call it the same game fundamentally? By definition, in order to make a game that is considered horrible good, you have to change some of the most fundamental aspects of gameplay.

Mind you, the flaws in Sonic The Hedgehog 2006 were primarily in how the characters played as opposed to the levels the characters traversed — most of the levels in Sonic The Hedgehog 2006 just being concepts that were already used in the two Sonic Adventure games. If I were to take Shadow The Hedgehog — another infamous game in the Sonic series — and remove the issues people had with that — the mission…