Taxman Briefly Courted for S4: E3 Development

The Sonic community has been abuzz recently after the news that Sonic 4: Episode 3 has been scrapped. Now, we can add another interesting twist to the story; a post by Christian “Taxman” Whitehead on Sonic Retro’s forums several days ago revealed that Sega briefly attempted to bring him onto the project. His post in full reads:

I’ve always assumed Sonic 4 Episode 3 fizzled out as things evolved with SOA, Sega Networks & F2P etc.

I guess it’s been long enough that it’s not relevant any more, but I was briefly asked if I would be interested in collaborating with Sega Studios Australia (Who did the Castle of Illusion remake) as a potential dev team to work on the third one. Sadly though, SSA were shut down, and Stealth and I worked on the Sonic 1 & 2 remasters in late 2012-2013.

Of course, you never know, Sonic Team could one day decide Ep3 should happen, but Ken pretty much confirms my personal thoughts.

When asked about the possibility of the game returning in the future, Taxman was quick to stress how brief his involvement was, but he did give his two cents on the matter:

Well, my “involvement” was really just a phone call so I don’t really feel it’s appropriate to make any kind of judgement that could be misconstrued as “official”. The only thing that could be said is that while Sega is around and has the Sonic IP, there’s nothing stopping them from coming back to it if they felt it was good for the market.

The idea of Taxman contributing to the development of a new game in the main Sonic series is certainly exciting, and although we’ll likely never know how such a product would have looked or played, it’s still fun to think about. We thank Yasir for tipping us off about Taxman’s comments; if you have news to share with us, remember to do so via the Send Tips link at the top of every page.