A Sonic Riders Remaster Is Exactly What 2024 Needs

Highlights

Sonic the Hedgehog’s enduring popularity is evident through blockbuster movies, game remakes, and a focus on fan-favorite characters like Shadow and Knuckles.
The Sonic series has a rich history of colorful titles well-suited for modern remakes and remasters, drawing in both old and new fans.
Sonic Riders, a unique hoverboard racing game from 2006, presents a high-energy futuristic experience that could benefit from a modern remake.

It’s hard to keep up with Sonic the Hedgehog, both the character and the franchise. Between the ongoing blockbuster movie series with the third installment expected in December and the recent Sonic x Shadow Generations title returning to us in Sony’s latest State of Play, fresh-faced and with a greater focus on Shadow and Knuckles, our favorite bipedal high-speed animal kingdom seems as alive and well as it ever was.

The Sonic series has a long rap sheet of colorful, bombastic titles to choose from across a wide range of consoles and generations, which has left it well-positioned to be prime material for this particular era of video game remakes and remasters using modern technology to provide enhanced experiences for old nostalgia.

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This, of course, has happened on many occasions, with more popular older titles seeing a return to glory and receiving love from fans old and new. It has only fueled fans’ desires to see more of their favorite old Sonic titles brought back to the forefront for an encore with a fresh coat of paint. The older Sonic collections of amalgamated re-releases drew as much attention and fanfare as newer titles do today, by respective relative comparisons, with the Sonic Adventure titles and the fast-growing 3D era of games generally leading the pack in terms of genre popularity.

Sonic has also had its fair share of racing game titles, of course, a given considering what the character is known for. For all the independent titles, remakes, remasters, crossovers, and guest appearances through the years, there’s still one offshoot side series I’ve been dying to see make a grand return: Sonic Riders.

Released in 2006, Sonic Riders was (is) an explosive spin-off racing game where the mode of transport through the thrilling eight distinctive racetracks was not by fleet of foot, not by miniature vehicle, but by hoverboard of all things. This is as uniquely peculiar a concept to me now as it was seeing it on the GameStop store shelves as a kid in the mid-2000s when couch co-op with your family members and neighborhood friends was the main appeal of multiplayer competitive games, as this game released in the PS2 and GameCube era, before online multiplayer was a real thing. Seeing my favorite hedgehog and company tear through these colorful re-imagined locales with which I’d become familiar through my consumption of other Sonic media but this time with the cast decked out in stylish techwear and on vehicles that were the height of sci-fi imagination at the time.

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I was mesmerized by the high-action future sci-fi fantasy rush aesthetic presented uniformly from the strong opening cutscene to the end credits. The specialized concept art style given to this game and subsequent titles in the series specifically was also particularly eye-catching and complemented the game’s tone in a way I could even appreciate back then but can do in a far more mature way these days.

Choosing between your favorite characters, categorized by either speed, power, and flying types depending on the most fitting categorization of each respective character (i.e. Tails would be flying, Knuckles would be power, etc.), unique hoverboards, called Extreme Gear in-game, with varying stats, and seeing these selections actively affect your ability to interact with the dynamic stages by way of opening specialized routes and excluding you from others and using unique abilities against other racers made each race as heated and sweaty a ride as the last.

The game’s soundtrack inspired my early fascination with high-tempo, drums and bass jungle music, as the accompanying OST between each racetrack and flashy cutscene stamped euphoric flashbacks of this wild ride of a game each time I hear the genre in passing; it was that gratifying of an experience. The game functions on sheer momentum, with tricks and adrenaline being embedded into its mechanics. Unlike typical racing games that rely almost solely on item pickups to provide boosts and advantages to players falling behind, racers in this game can catch up by riding along the turbulence left behind by racers ahead of you, taking shortcuts made specifically for your character’s racer type, hitting an array of air tricks when zooming off ramps to maintain energy, mastering the drift mechanics, and, of course, ground speed boosts and items.

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The bonus modes have varied multiplayer options (boasting that couch co-op I mentioned before) but with a few more selections than just speeding around the tracks. There’s Tag Mode, which requires you to stick close to a partner during a race or be penalized, Survival Mode, where you actually attack other players to swipe a chaos emerald and carry it through gates in a mean game of what is basically Sonic flag football, Mission Mode, where you do specific feats to unlock rewards, and the shop where you spend rings won in other modes to purchase an assorted list of Extreme Gear. The game is very sure of itself in a lot of ways, and that confidence in the branding only aided in the execution of outputting a timeless Sonic experience unlike anything else pumped out by the Sonic Team or Sega since the Sonic Riders series originally dropped.

That’s why I truly think the game could stand the test of time and be met with a laudable amount of fanfare should the game be either remade or remastered in a newer game engine and with Sega’s more visionary developers. Compiling all three of the Riders trilogy titles (those sequels being Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity and Sonic Free Riders, respectively) into one title with refurbished graphics and animations, an enhanced soundtrack that stays true to the core of the OST that did much for defining the mood of the game(s), and revamping the unique multiplayer modes for online lobbies and competitive spaces for the casual gamers, the streamers, and the esports competitors to all thoroughly enjoy, and you have yourself what will essentially feel like the second coming of a phenomenal Sonic spin-off.

The success of other Sonic remasters serves as a good precedent for the kind of reception we could hope to receive, but with enough forewarning of its release, the addition of a healthy handful of story and/or side content, additional characters for the roster, and some new racetracks, Sonic Riders has success pre-baked into its recipe if only Sega and the Sonic Team would capitalize on it the way I’m certain they can.