Welcome to the Marble Mania Zone project!
(this site is a heavy work in progress)
Marble Mania Zone is an attempt to create an exhaustive list of every little reference and easter egg in Sonic Mania.
Sonic Mania is a game released back in August of 2017, which got a major DLC update, Sonic Mania Plus, in July of 2018. It was made to commemorate the Sonic series' then 25th anniversary, paying tribute to the series and mostly the original Genesis Sonic games. If you're here, you're probably familiar enough with Sonic Mania to know that it had a lot of references to past Sonic games in it. That's what this site is for.
References and easter eggs have always been a part of the Sonic series, even all the way back in the first game, and Mania certainly does not disappoint, having references packed into every little corner of the game. Heck, the game's very existence is a reference, if you really think about it.
Anyway, let's get to why this site exists.
Once upon a time, I found myself in Studiopolis Zone. I'd already beaten the game several times, so this time I was taking it slow to really pay attention to all the little details of the game. That's when I came across this little decoration here, a lamp with a strange spinning thing in it:
In case you don't know, this is a reference to a scrapped decoration from the Sonic 1 prototype, these strange UFO things in the background of Marble Zone:
The fact that this was here, such a small and easy to miss reference to an obscure beta element of the first game, it was such cool attention to detail. And when I kept looking, I kept finding things just like this. That's when I knew I wanted to make this website, to document every little easter egg like this. It's been about two years since then, and now I'm finally ready to make this thing a reality.
When you wanna begin reading, where better to start than the start?