Sonic Mania Plus comes with a rad Mega Drive homage cover in Japan

Alternate covers are the best thing

As an ’80s kid cracking open a full-color manual with a new game was pretty much the best. I didn’t care if it was the sequel to a game that I knew from back to front or if the booklet was just a few pages, it was an awesome extra little feeling that you were able to experience. Now that joy is pretty much distilled into “alternate covers” for physical media in the age of digital.

That’s why this Sonic Mania Plus cover caught my eye, even if it’s sadly relegated to Japan. The Japanese version recently launched alongside of the western editions, and come to find out the region gets an exclusive alt cover at that pays homage to the Mega Drive era of Sonic.

You can find video proof by way of an unboxing from Since Spacies below. Hopefully Sega will give us an official version to print!