Sonic The Hedgehog Mod Degrades Game Quality In Real Time In The Weirdest Way

The modding community can give older games a much-needed overhaul, or add an extra challenge to maybe an oversimplistic one. In recent years, we’ve seen everything from Resident Evil demakes to GTA upgrades–not to mention the vast landscape of Baldur’s Gate 3 mods–but a new mod for 1991’s Sonic the Hedgehog adjusts the game’s visuals in real-time, going back and forth depending on the player’s blast processing in the game.

Brandon Sheffield of Necrosoft Games showed how the mod worked on his Bluesky account and did a quick demo.

“Vladikcomper on the SGDK Discord has created an amazing and ridiculous mod for Sonic the Hedgehog (MD) in which quality degrades to different resolutions/numbers of colors unless you fill your blast processing meter up,” he said, as the game switched from widescreen to smaller size as the gameplay went on.

“Blast Processing” was the marketing term used by Sega of America to describe the processing capabilities of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive that didn’t really have any technological explanation, but sounded cool. With this mod, the player has a blast processing meter at the bottom of the right screen, which shows the processing power at that moment. If the player lets Sonic get hit or slow down, the game degrades from 16-bit graphics to almost Game Boy levels.

You can find this mod, and a slew of other Sonic-centric mods, here.

The recent Sonic the Hedgehog 3 movie was a huge holiday hit, with a fourth installment to the franchise already in the works and aimed with a March 2027 release.