How SEGA caused Archie's Reboot.

Before we go on with this, I want to assure you that Archive Binge: Part IV is coming soon.

Now let's go back to one of my favourite topics: The various ways in which SEGA managed to completely bugger Archie's chances of being decent. Because hey, with the recent announcement of Sonic Boom: Fire and Ice and their complete absence from E3, battering SEGA is too easy an opportunity to avoid (Except the guy running the Sonic Twitter thing, because he is hilarious).

Ironically, I brought up this issue in one of my two journals on the topic of the latest Boom abomination that I'll probably end up buying anyway because I'm kind of a sucker. On the other hand maybe all my money will be spent on Starfox and Bonkles, because Nintendo and Lego hate my wallet. Said journal can be found here: toaarcan.deviantart.com/journa…

For those of you that didn't go and read it, I pointed out that, among its many, many failings, Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood began the chain of events that would lead to the reboot. "But wait!", you cry. "Chronicles was made by Bioware!" Yes, it was. However, SEGA had a lot of control, evidenced by a major turning point during the story development, which I will explain later. And it was their fault that Bioware were not informed enough.

One of Chronicles' few redeeming qualities is that it manages to squeeze in a boatload of references without making them obtuse, unlike a certain comic writer. FOr example, when the heroes first encounter one of the Gizoid mooks, they will comment that it looked like Emerl... and then the discussion of that will stop, rather than having to explain who he was, what he did, why he did it, etcetera. He is brought up again if you choose to do the sidequests where you take relics from Nocturne to Nestor, an old, exiled echidna, the last one will be a piece of scrap from a Gizoid, which will cause him to reminisce about knowing one such robot with a surprising amount of personality. Once again, Emerl is mentioned, but Nestor becomes too choked up with memories of his life before his exile to continue, and retires to his  bed, once again stopping the subject. If you want to know more, you have to go to the game's codex.

So yes, there are references. But what surprised a lot of people was the amount of Archie references. SWATbots (That sort of look like the bigger variants like Combots) as mooks, roboticization, the heroes being coordinated instead of just stopping whatever shows up when it shows up, and of course, the main antagonists being pretty much ripped off wholesale from Ken Penders' Knuckles stories.

Let's not try to deny this. The Nocturnus are the Dark Legion. Technologically advanced race of black-clad echidnas, ancient enemies of Knuckles' people, stuck in an alternate dimension with the "Twilight" moniker? One of them happens to be a female that almost certainly has a thing going on with Knuckles and pulls a heel-face turn? WHich brings me onto Shade, who is so close to being Julie-Su in terms of story, it's not even funny. And yet for some reason a fair amount of people act like she's a much better character? Uh... Is this just one of those things I'm not going to understand in the Sonic fandom? Like why people like Sonic X, or why when twelve year olds make overpowered recolours it's bad, but when Ian Flynn does it it's just fine? Okay, whatever.


Point is, CHronicles is basically ripped-off from Penders' work. THe most common explanation for this is that when Bioware were writing the game's plot, they had assumed that the comics were a lot more important to the franchise than they are, and decided to adapt a comic story that leant itself to the game they were going to make. Then SEGA came in and said "Er, no. THat's not our continuity, so it doesn't count. Change it." So they made suspiciously similar substitutes instead, which caused our favourite self-absorbed jackass of an ex-writer to decide that they were plagarising him.

And, well, to be fair, they kinda were.

So he got pissed and decided to sue SEGA, and filed copyrights on his characters and stories in order to do so. THen Archie rushed in half-cocked and sued him, and a year or so later, reboot.


So how is this SEGA's fault? Well, they could've told Bioware what they could and couldn't use. In fact, they should've. For a group so fond of telling people that make stuff for them exactly how to do it, they didn't seem to care with this thing. If they'd just done that, then there would've been no sorta-plagarism, so no pissed off Penders, so likely little happening on that front. Alternatively, SEGA could've bit the bullet and used the comic characters. After all, a considerable amount of people were asking for it, especially back at that point in time, when the full implications of being a SEGA character in Archie weren't known. It would've been pretty hype if they had, and if they decided they didn't want to stick with it, use the spinoff excuse. After all, it's not like the elements and characters introduced in CHronicles have even been mentioned since, is it? But if they had, they would've copyrighted the characters themselves, leaving Penders with nothing to work with.

Either way, if they'd done those things, then Penders likely would not have filed those copyrights and started this whole mess. Ironic, really. The thing started with a SEGA fuckup (Poor control on Chronicles), and ended with one (SEGA not stepping in to prove that Penders' cast were derivative of theirs). And now Penders is going after them for ripping off his stories in Chronicles.

You know what, given how bad Chronicles was, with it's being an obvious beta, causing such a mess, not really fitting into the canon despite referencing it, and generally just being bad, I'd prefer if it had simply never been released.