Sonic Mania

Sonic The Hedgehog Discovery , later retitled Sonic Mania, is Part 1 of the 25th anniversary game series in the franchise. It was developed by Christian "The Taxman" Whitehead, Simon "Stealth" Thomley (credited here as "Headcannon") and PagodaWest Games - the latter consisting of members of the Sonic 2HD Project staff. The result is a game that is beautifully crafted with love for all things Classic Sonic.

It should be noted that several Modern Sonic fans have been annoyed at the success of this game and Sega's shilling of Classic Sonic within the last two years - a factor that caused Matt to begin planning Green Eyed Monster.

Unsurprisingly, this is Matt's second favourite Sonic game. As for Plus and Encore Mode... not so much.

Relevance To TME
This game's dropping, as well as the creation of Plus, was one of the reasons why The Channel Rethink came into effect, as Matt wanted to cover the game and the canon surrounding it in more detail.

To call it the main reason for Matt to plan the rethink is a bit too generous, though it was a major factor. Matt's love for this game is noted in various sources, such as the first episode of the Quick Opinions of Sonic series, as well as in his earliest livestreams. It was also the basis for a (now unlisted video) which parodied the intro to "Into the Spider-Verse", featuring Matt's questionable Sonic impression.

Sonic: The Classic Adventures took inspiration from this, and uses several assets from it; The Hard-Boiled Heavies, Phantom Ruby and Robotnik's castle-like laboratory all feature in STCA. Sonic himself even gets nicknamed "The Mania".

Matt was originally supposed to review this game after hitting 70 subscribers, but forgot about it, and other things took priority in his life at that point. Matt will eventually review the game in a collaboration with ChilliusVGM.