Open Surge

About

Sonic the Hedgehog is a 1991 Sega Genesis platform game by Sonic Team in which Sonic runs at high speed, collects rings and tries to stop Doctor Robotnik. Open Surge is an open-source 2D retro game engine written in C with the Allegro library, shipped with Surge the Rabbit, a jump 'n' run made in the spirit of 16-bit Sonic platformers. It includes SurgeScript, a scripting language for building new mechanics, characters and bosses, and runs on Windows, Linux and Android.

How it differs from the original

Instead of Sonic it stars its own character, Surge the Rabbit, and uses its own assets rather than the original game's. It is also a general-purpose engine: players can build and share their own games and mods with it.

Getting started

Download it from the project website or install it from your Linux distribution's packages, including Flatpak and Snap. To play a mod, extract it and launch its executable on Windows, or load its package from the game's options screen on other platforms.

History

The project was started by Alexandre Martins, a computer scientist from Brazil, and now has contributors from around the world.

Media

Additional notes

Flatpak

The Flatpak build cannot read your home folder by default; granting it filesystem access is needed to load mods stored there.