The developers behind Sonic Mania, and it’s follow up Sonic Mania Plus has formed a new game development studio called Evening Star. The new studio, based in Los Angles, Melbourne and London, consist of talented people behind Sonic Mania. Executive producer Dave Padilla serves as Evening Star’s CEO, Christian Whitehead is the creative director and lead engine architect, Tom Fry is the art director, Hunter Bridges is the technical and audio director, and Brad Flick is the design director. Here is a brief description of the game studio from their website.
“Evening Star is a boutique game studio founded in late 2018. Headquartered in Los Angeles, with operations in Melbourne and London, Evening Star’s mission is designing fresh, fun games which will stand the test of time.
For Evening Star, being a “boutique” game studio has a specific meaning. Every member pursues a goal to make their own great games. By encouraging strong technical foundations in every discipline, members are given a voice and latitude to impact games in unique ways. By reinvigorating gaming history’s more cunning techniques, the team boldly explores directions long since left behind. With that driving approach, and a proprietary engine and tool set, Evening Star has developed an innovative workflow which minimizes the barriers between ideas and execution.
Creating games that shine bright… Evening Star casts a light into the future.”
Seeing that most of the developers of Sonic Mania team coming together again may see the likelihood of a successor to Sonic Mania stronger or perhaps more unique games from Evening Star. What are your thoughts on this announcement? Give us your thoughts on the comments below.
Ad:
It’s almost like they’ve come together to officially start work on Sonic Mania 2 (which probably has already started to be developed).
Chances of this being an internal SEGA studio?
They would become like SEGA’s best new western based studio since STI (Sega Technical Institute) – which worked on SEGA’s Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (1992) for the Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) among other SEGA hits like Comix Zone and VectorMan ect.
I was thinking the same about Whitehead and a new STI. I hope it will be a thing.
Even if it will be hard to beat Creative assembly as the best western studio (Alien Isolation is HUGE and the new mega FPS project could be the Blockbuster Sega was waiting for)
I too am waiting for the announcement of the CA FPS project with trepidation…
This is a situation of a different caliber, but no less promising 😉
I have huge expectations toward this company… maybe they could become the true Sonic Team
I hope they cooperate exclusively with SEGA…
The big S should not miss this opportunity, as he did in the past often and willingly…
Evening Star… I got chills.
Sounds promising, they sound ambitious and raring to go with it. It seems as though some studios just lose the spirit and morale they had and become more stagnant and decline or become stagnant when they decline after losing their ambition.
A lot of SEGAs internal studios went that way in 2001 after Sega agreed to finally bow out of the home hardware market and remain only an arcade hardware manufacturer as well as a platform agnostic software publishing house.
Maybe Sega should incorporate this studio as theirs because they are mostly already experienced at working under Sega already and a major company like Sega still has it’s place on the map.
Plus it will finally put an end to the ignoramouses that keep still stating that Sonic Mania is a fan game.
I hope this is a great sign of things to come.