Sonic Mania was pitched as a love letter to the early Sonic games. That's how fans and critics received it, too — as the best Sonic platformer in years, with an aesthetic and controls that felt right out of the Genesis era.
But for me, the best throwback moment in Sonic Mania was its level-ending nod to Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine. I've been thinking about this lately because Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine is included in the Sega Genesis tab on Nintendo Switch Online and is one of the puzzle games I've been digging deep into. The game is essentially a Puyo Puyo port with a very light coat of Sonic paint, and I've been having a great time revisiting it. Using NSO's suspend states is allowing me to progress further than I ever did as a kid playing it via the Sonic Mega Collection on GameCube. The game has a password system but, for whatever reason, I never used it.
Sonic Mania incorporated Mean Bean Machine into the end of Chemical Plant Zone Act 2. Rolling (around at the speed of sound) through a glass tube, Sonic tumbles down to a control panel where he's seated next to Dr. Eggman. Suddenly, pairs of colored beans begin falling into their respective reservoirs. In the game's best and biggest surprise, Eggman and Sonic are now engaged in an in-world match of Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine.
Despite repeated rereleases of the original game, this was the first time that Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine had been remade for a modern audience. Christian Whitehead and the teams of developers at PagodaWest Games, Headcannon, and Hyperkinetic Studios updated the look of the beans to give them more personality, with big googly eyes and slimy bodies that slosh believably as they bash into place next to matching goops. Care has also been paid to what Sonic does as he plays the game, too. His pupils point to the left, toward the game, and his eyes occasionally narrow as he maneuvers the beans into place. His mouth hangs open in an O-shape, which will be recognizable to any gamer as a look of slack-jawed concentration. His hands even move in the direction that he manoeuvres the beans, as if his white-gloved hand rests on a joystick we can't see.
Any series that goes on for as long as Sonic is bound to get its share of spin-offs. Metal Gear Solid gave us Metal Gear Acid, Final Fantasy gave us Final Fantasy Tactics, and Mario gave us more parties, karts, and Olympic games than we could ever dedicate due time to. Despite gaming's proclivity for spin-offs, it's rare to see the spin-off get folded back into the main series in this way. When fans and critics talked about Sonic Mania at release, we were often expressing surprise that it had taken Sega handing the keys over to an outside developer to get a great new Sonic game. But the understanding that Whitehead and co. brought to the project shows that sometimes an outsider has a clearer understanding of what makes a franchise great than the people who are closest to it.
Once you win, Eggman gets toasted and Sonic heads back out the glass tubes, which are now routed to lead to the end of the level, where you can hop on a big bomb's plunger unleashing a payload of innocent creatures who have now been freed. They're free because of you… because you were a mean bean matching machine.