The Video That Never Was: "Sonic & The Fear of Speed"

If it sucks, hit the bricks.

That's the mantra behind the PDF I'm releasing here. My original plan for this document was to provide a complete picture on this video, start to completion, but as you'll quickly learn, getting this to fruition was a long, arduous struggle. Some benefit did come from it, but ultimately, I'm in a weird place, and the Sonic franchise is in a weird place. No sense letting this rattle around in the back of my brain for ten full years. In this format, in this type of video, this is where it comes to an end, though as I say in the document itself, you'll notice that ideas I bring forth here still leak out in other ways in other places.

Slow down, what actually IS this?

If you want to keep it as simple as possible, this is was a script for a pseudo-sequel to "How Do We Fix Sonic?" It would have been a very big, long video (1+ hour) that pulls apart a long stretch of Sonic games and talks about an ongoing problem they faced. Unlike "How Do We Fix?", it would not have been focused so much on replacing the game design of Sonic games, but it would have still been a very deep dive into a lot of ideas.

The video went through many forms, starting from a Waypoint freelance article pitch in 2017 to a Sonic Forces video review to something much, much much larger. This document is over 60 pages long, showing every draft and outline I created along the way. The final draft, located at the bottom of the document, is about 70% complete, making up 23 total pages of words. There's so much to read here, there's a functional table of contents that your PDF reader of choice can hopefully use.

Each attempt to figure out how to collect and write such a gigantic concept is designated by the year it was attempted, with an introductory paragraph to explain what happened to that version of the script and why it was never completed.

More gets said in the document, but the the long and short of it is, I don't think it is prudent to worry about this anymore. Maybe I'll revisit this idea, maybe sooner rather than later, but right now things are too up in the air for all involved parties. So I'm giving the middle finger to sunk-cost fallacy and washing my hands of it for now.

A part of me also thinks that if I actually attempted to produce this video as it stands here, it might have actually killed me, given the length and complexity.

There will be a second post about this same article at some point in the future. I need to get this up for Youtube Members now too, which means converting this into a "Very Early Access" podcast. I think I'll axe some of the outlines and stick to the drafts, but it will require some additional writing around those elements to help better explain things. So if you'd rather listen to a lot of TTS read this out, interspersed with short segments by me to set things up, that's coming.

Otherwise, enjoy the long, awkward, semi-complete read.

And yes, if you've heard me mention "The Sonic Forces Video That Isn't Really About Sonic Forces Anymore", that's this.