Download (MP3)
Download (End card acoustic short: Extras Menu)

The final song of 2016 is our sequel, or perhaps prequel, to the Sonic Fan Medley made back in 2014: Sonic Fan Medley 2: Genesis Edition. I didn’t plan for this to be the last song of the year, but it wound up taking me a lot longer than I had anticipated, so it took the spot by default. As huge as this song as though, it still made for a great finale.

For the first Sonic Fan Medley, back when my Youtube subscriber base was literally 10% of what it is now, I posted a trailer video where people could tweet at me or comment on the video a Sonic song they wanted in the medley, and we randomly chose 10 via RandomPicker.com. This time around that wouldn’t have worked out too well: with 10x the fan base, almost every Sonic song would be entered, so it’d be like we were just choosing 10 random Sonic songs.

So instead, everyone was able to enter a song via the Youtube entry video, tweeting #SonicFanMedley2, or posting on the Patreon entry post, with the song they wanted to enter. A single person could enter 3 different songs, or the same song 3 times, if they chose to do enter all three ways.

After a week, I counted up all the votes (by hand, it took me a few hours, haha). Hundreds of votes were cast, and I chose the top 4 songs from Sonic 1, top 4 from Sonic 2, top 4 from Sonic 3 & Knuckles, and 4 more songs from other non-trilogy titles (which happened to end up at 1 for each of those). I did it this way because I wanted the trilogy titles to be the main focus, and also for each trilogy game to get it’s fair share of songs. Otherwise, if we went stricly by vote count, there would be no Sonic 1 songs, and the medley would’ve been mostly Sonic 3&K songs. So it was all about evenness.

It was a close race between a lot of the songs, but the two that dominated the most were Stardust Speedway Bad Future (JP) from Sonic CD with 35 votes, and Chemical Plant Zone from Sonic 2 with 27 votes.

I’ve touched on a few of these songs previously. The very first song of the medley, Green Hill Zone, I’ve done on 3 other seperate occasions: as it’s own song in 2010, in the 50th song special Blast from the Past, and in the 100th song special GaMedley. Spring Yard Zone was in the first Sonic Fan Medley (and was the only Genesis Sonic song). Mystic Cave had a brief, unofficial appearance in the original Sonic Fan Medley trailer, after which was highly demanded as a full cover, and was the second highest Sonic 2 song requested for this medley behind Chemical Plant, with 14 votes. And Marble Zone was an acoustic short, if you want to count that, haha.

For the most part, I included the entirety of every song in this medley. The exceptions I can think of off the top of my head would be cutting the intro a bit shorter in Chemical Plant Zone, Ice Cap Zone, Stardust Speedway Bad Future JP and especially Rusty Ruin Zone which is originally… pretty long. Toxic Caves is also arranged a bit differently from the original.

Sonic music has always been some of my favorites, so even though it took a while (literally spent 8-10 hours a day on this on the days I could!) I had a blast recording this medley. The song line-up was pretty much perfect, and that’s thanks to you all!

People are already wanting a Sonic Fan Medley 3. I’ll think about it. xD