The Sonic Rush games on Nintendo DS are getting a “definitive” PC release care of boisterous fangamers

A group of fangame developers have taken it upon themselves to make a new Sonic Rush game for PC, combining the previous Sonic Rush games for Nintendo DS into one “definitive” remastering, with extra stuff and some apparently overdue fixes. Seems bold! I missed the Rush games back in the noughties, but I do like me a Sonic. Here’s a trailer for Sonic Rush Rerun.

“The idea behind this remaster is to take the greatest strengths of the Sonic Rush trilogy, crank them up to 11, and combine them together to bring this game formula to its PEAK,” explain the developers in the blurb. “We want to make a definitive version of Sonic Rush for PC with additional content and to fix the problems with the original game.” I assume they’re calling it a “trilogy” in light of the general conviction that Sonic Colors is an unofficial third Rush game.

I like the energy here, but I fear I must break off this report to deliver an agonising Old Man appraisal of something that has been bugging me for years. PSA game developers: the “up to 11” line is not supposed to be repeated sincerely. It comes from 1984 rock band mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, in which there’s a scene where lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel shows off his custom amp, which has a volume setting with 11 levels, but isn’t actually any louder than an amp with 10 levels.

It’s supposed to be a joke about meaningless exaggeration. But because humans are forgetful, perishable sacks of meat, and perhaps because videogame-adjacent humans especially tend to venerate numbers like gods, I keep hearing the phrase “turn it up to 11” uttered with what sounds like full seriousness.

I don’t know if there’s some kind of central marketing authority I can appeal to, here, but please can you all knock it off, because whenever I read these words in press releases, I feel like I am taking crazy pills. If nothing else, game developers, the nature of the joke means that you don’t have to stop at 11. You can turn it up to 12! You can turn it up to 13, even! First one to turn it up to 13 in a press release gets their game an automatic 13/10. Or would do, if we had a scoring system. See, I always give myself an out.

Anyway, back to Sonic Rush Rerun. The project lead is MelohRush, who got into fan animations because he played Sonic Frontiers and thought it needed “an extra punch of style”. These youngsters! So impetuous. According to his portfolio, he’s worked on *grits teeth* 11 Sonic projects to date.

He’s joined by lead programmer Crimznraze, lead modeller Ozark and a small village of modellers, programmers, level designers, animators, sprite artists, composers, sound designers, voice actors, writers and graphic designers. It’s a tidy production. You can find some music for the game’s soundtrack on the Youtube page.

Sonic Rush Rerun has no release date. Thanks to Jeremy for spotting it and lobbing it into the friendly sausage machine that is our news Slack. As ever with fangames, its eventual launch rests on Sega’s willingness not to sue the pants off the creators for breach of copyright. Sega have proven pretty relaxed on this front, as large corporations go, and have reaped the fruits in the form of a lively community of Sonicmakers, busily engineering forms of hedgehog-based entertainment poor Yuji Naka never dreamed of in 1991. Some have gone onto work for the Blue Blur directly.