""There was a period after the development of Sonic Mania when we worked with them to consider concepts for the next generation of Classic Sonic," Iizuka says. "It's too bad that it didn't become a finished game. Still, I'm pleased that the next generation of Classic Sonic that we talked about with them has been achieved with Superstars."

One major hurdle to providing a true successor to Sonic Mania is that Iizuka and Sonic Team wanted to move away from the pixel-art graphics with the next new title in the Classic Sonic series. "When you make a 2D game using pixel art, you kind of end up targeting a very specific core audience," he says. "We wanted to bring this game to as many people as possible and in order to really make it look and feel as appealing to a wider audience, we needed to use the 3D assets to really give it that current look. But we do know that core fans want that old Classic Sonic look, they want that old classic Sonic feel, so we focused on making sure the controls were solid and the look and the feel was really representative of a classic Sonic game."

Whitehead also dashed away one of the big points of speculation among Sonic fans: that Sonic Mania 2 falling through was the result of bad blood between Sega and members of Evening Star. "Contrary to any rumors, we maintain a friendly relationship with Sega and hope fans are pumped to play both games once they release," he says."

Sega with the absolutely retarded decisions again. They had a team that could make stellar 2D Sonic games for, I assume, cheap enough and with most likely high sales, could consult on the series for forever and they just let them go