Sonic Dreams Collection

Sonic Dreams Collection is an art game from 2015, developed by Arcane Kids for OS X and Windows. It is an unofficial title based on Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog series, bundling four minigames that are framed as incomplete Sonic games. Over time, the collection reveals itself to be a psychological horror game that parodies the Sonic fandom of the era, known for its oddities. The project began with ideas created by several people during a Sonic-themed Valentine's Day event on the game-sharing site Glitch City. It was released as freeware on August 10, 2015.

The four minigames are Make My Sonic, a glitchy character creator where players adjust a Sonic model's colors and limb sizes, then pick a randomly generated name; Eggman Origin, a vestigial massively multiplayer online role-playing game that requires the player to run a separate executable alongside the main game and feed worms to Doctor Eggman to complete it; Sonic Movie Maker, an adventure game where players find a camera and film six-second clips in voyeuristic, fetishized scenes; and My Roommate Sonic, a game from a first-person view where the player sits beside Sonic and follows text-message instructions from Eggman to pursue romance, ending with a black hole and a distorted Green Hill Zone (Oculus Rift support was added later via a patch). The minigames are described in-game as products of a fake Sega studio called MJSTUDIO, supposedly made for the Dreamcast in the late 1990s.

The game was developed by Arcane Kids, an indie studio known for joke titles like Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective and the unreleased Pokémon Millennial Edition. Designer Ben Esposito said the team treated it as a work of art, designed to celebrate and satirize the Sonic fandom. The minigames were originally made separately for Glitch City's "Sonic is My Boyfriend" Valentine's Day event; for instance, Sonic Movie Maker was created by Arjun Prakash, a Glitch City co-founder. Sonic Dreams Collection was released with a satirical press release claiming the contents were found on a Dreamcast software development kit bought on eBay in 2013. It quickly drew attention from video game journalists, who found it scary and bizarre but considered it worth playing and noted its commentary on the Sonic fanbase. Geek.com named it the best game of 2015.