Triple Trouble 16-bit has immediately rocketed into my top Sonic fan games, up there with titles like Before & After the Sequel, and the immortal Sonic Robo Blast 2. When it comes to this sort of thing, Sega is pretty cool. As for legality, Sega has generally been happy to turn a blind eye to the Sonic fan game community so long as they don’t charge for their efforts – indeed, it’s that community that bred the key staff who went on to work for the publisher on Sonic Mania, Origins, and several other ports of classic games.
There’s no Mega Drive emulator required, as this is a coded-from-scratch PC executable that’ll run on even weaker PCs, and runs like a dream on the Steam Deck. Especially when you consider the price of entry: free.
It doesn’t necessarily have the polish of an official release, and trips on a couple of the tried-and-true fan game pitfalls – but boy, it feels close to official quality, and most importantly feels well worth your time. This 16-bit reimagining of Triple Trouble is ultimately still a fan game. Along the way, you can see key inspiration from another great Sonic revival in recent years: Sonic Mania. That’s what Triple Trouble 16-bit is about – a fan-made game that reimagines the entirety of Triple Trouble as if it were made for Mega Drive/Genesis, in the wake of Sonic 3 & Knuckles. That placement in the Sonic timeline got some fans thinking: what if this game had been 16-bit, and what if it were a sequel to Sonic 3 & Knuckles? What if it were, essentially, Sonic 4?
This 8-but title is actually older than Sonic’s other classic 2D adventures, releasing for the Sega Game Gear handheld a few months after Sonic & Knuckles hit Mega Drive. Most notable of these is Sonic the Hedgehog: Triple Trouble. A few of these games were loose adaptations of their Mega Drive equivalents – but a few were all-original affairs.
Because the 8-bit games came out at roughly the same time as the 16-bit games, they’re rightly not as revered or beloved – but they are still, broadly, lovely little platformers that attempt to adapt the Sonic formula for much weaker platforms. For those of you who aren’t a thousand years old, Triple Trouble is a classic 8-bit Sonic game.
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