#stelmo98

So for those who don't know, this is a project by Stelmo98 and Beatz where they are taking the old 2019 version of Project Hero (a hotly anticipated 3D Sonic game of the era with a lot of good "sauce" in its gameplay feel) and basically making a whole game with it by porting levels from other Sonic games into it.

And it's really cool in the sense they've just stealth announced what is kinda-sorta Sonic Generations 2, with one of the best-feeling Sonic fan engines out there. 9 8 not-quite-new levels that have been expanded and reworked to play nice in Project Hero.

Except, well, ever since a friend pointed it out, there is a worry growing increasingly loud in my mind:

There's the implication that Hero, the developer of Project Hero, has washed his hands of the project. As they point out, he uploaded a much later (2021) build of the game that they aren't as fond of, but as of yet, neither Stelmo or Beatz have answered me about whether or not they have checked if Hero is cool with them taking over his game.

Now: in their defense, in Hero's SFGHQ post about the 2021 build of Project Hero does contain a Q&A section, where Hero states:

Q: Is this open source? A: No. It can probably be decompiled easily, though, so you're free to do that if you so desire. Q: Will you continue Sonic Project Hero? A: Unfortunately, no.

So he's actually encouraging others to decompile his game, and suggests he isn't coming back to it. But he doesn't actually say if it's okay to continue Project Hero without him. And there's a part in one of Stelmo's showcase videos where he refers to Project Hero as "our game", like he's fully taken ownership of it now, and that feels a little weird.

This is a topic I've wrestled with for many years, because obviously, most fangames are created by taking official graphics, official music, and in some cases even official code, and remixing it. But when it comes to ripping graphics, music, and code from somebody else's fangame, it feels super different to me and not cool at all, right?

But isn't it all just stealing? Aren't we justifying that it's okay to steal from Sega, but not steal from fellow colleagues?

And in talking about this in the context of this Project Hero Rewired thing, somebody said something that finally unlocked it in my brain:

If you went into work one day and somebody had reorganized the break room, like removed a bunch of chairs, added new tables, changed out appliances or whatever, you'd sort of just accept that, right? It's a corporate space. The business owns that. There's something inhuman and dissociative about that.

But if somebody came into your bedroom and rearranged all of your furniture and replaced a bunch of your clothes, that would be offensive, right? You're an individual. You're a person. It would be an invasion of your personal space. That is different. That's very different. It's changing (or even stealing) parts of an individual human's identity.

And that's weird. Maybe don't do that.