The Sonic Hacking Contest 2026 is Here

Ladies, gentleman, and everything in between, it’s that time once again. The Sonic Hacking Contest is back once more!

I keep saying this every time I cover it but, in case you don’t know, the Sonic Hacking Contest is a yearly event put on by fans of Sonic the Hedgehog to showcase ROM hacks and game mods for various Sonic games. With each entry competing to win awards, with the awards this year being voted on by the community (with the deadline for voting, being on November 1st at 8AM BST). There’s been a decent shake up this year, but it’s mainly a bunch of smaller things adding up to a big thing.

Unlike past years however, they’ve removed the judged and unjudged tags on entries, presenting all the entries under three main categories. With those categories being ROM Hacks, which can be played on real hardware, Modern 2D, which are entries that are played on more modern 2D versions of Sonic games, and 3D, which are entries for 3D Sonic games. The latter two categories require that you own the games the mods are made for, while the ROM hacks can be played in your emulator, or hardware of choice. you can find the entries over at SHC.zone. And here are a few entries that I’ve sampled so far this year.

Starting off in the ROM Hacking category, we have Sonic 1 But Your Past Haunts You by Selbi. Inspired by a level in the first Rayman game, this is a twist on Sonic 1 where you have a dark doppelganger following your every move. It’s really cool because this one addition really changes how you play the game. But sadly, I’m not very good at it. However the idea is still really cool, and I’d love to see someone who is good at Sonic 1 try and play through the game with this hack. I think it’d make for a fun challenge.

For the Modern 2D entry, I have what I think might be seen as an odd choice, but man it’s so fun. It’s Sonic Mania Breakout (SHC26 Showcase) by Jamesith. This is a clone of the classic Atari arcade game Breakout, but made in the Retro Engine with Sonic Mania themed assets. While it is just a game of Breakout at it’s core, it has random challenges and effects that trigger throughout the game which adds some nice variety to the gameplay. It’s really fun and something I can see myself coming back to when I want to play something that isn’t Balatro while listening to a YouTube video essay in the background.

https://retrorgb.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Sonic-Mania-Breakout1.mp4

And for the 3D category, I give you Generations Project Demo by GensProjectTeam. A mod for Sonic Unleashed, running on Unleashed Recompiled. Back in the 2013 Sonic Hacking Contest, a mod for Sonic Generations called The Unleashed Project was released. That mod aimed to bring all the main daytime levels from Sonic Unleashed into Generations, because at the time there was a desire among Sonic fans to play Unleashed (or a facsimile of it) on PC. And without a native PC version of Unleashed, the best we could do was modding the levels from that game into the most similar feeling Sonic game there was on PC. The reason for the brief history lesson is because the Generations Project mod is basically doing this, but in reverse. Taking the Modern Sonic stages from Generations and bringing them to Sonic Unleashed. And while there’s not a lot of reasons to do this because you can play Gens on PC already, I think this is neat. I’ve always wondered how it’d feel to play through these levels with Unleashed Sonic instead of Gens Sonic, and now I was able to satisfy my curiosity. But man it messed with my muscle memory. You wouldn’t think that there would be enough of a difference in how Sonic feels to control in each of these games to majorly impact how the levels play. But man, there a decent amount of differnces. Generations came out 3 years after Unleashed, and before that they also released Sonic Colors, so they had two games to refine how Sonic felt to control, and you can feel that when flipping between the levels in this mod and Sonic Generations. I recommend trying this mod out, especially because I think it’s really neat. The mod also includes options you can configure to change the game’s HUD to match what’s in Sonic Generations, as well as an option to do the same for object models and some enemies, which is shown in the first 2 level screenshots.

Overall, there’s some really cool stuff in this SHC. Though most of it is dominated by 2D stuff this year, which I don’t mind and understand. Since it’s easier to make stuff for 2D games over the 3D games in the series. As I said above, you can play all these and more if you go to SHC.zone and don’t forget to make an account and vote before the deadline, because the awards the entries are competing for are being voted on by the community this year. I’ll be trying to vote for things too. Have fun playing the entries!