SAGE 2026 Showcase
Image: The Sonic Amateur Games Expo

You can't go five minutes without tripping over some kind of indie games showcase event these days, but one I'll always make time for each year is SAGE - the Sonic Amateur Games Expo, which first debuted in 2020 but has been running annually since 2005, run by the Sonic Fangames HQ community. Originally designed to shine a spotlight on Sonic fangames, the event has grown into a massive festival celebrating fan-works in general and new indie games inspired by the classics. Each event kicks off with a gigantic trailer medley accompanied by some great music and more games than you can reasonably process. So eyes open, slam something caffeinated, and just try to keep up with this year's opening show:

That's a lot, huh? But it's not hard to notice that for every fancy commercial project shown there, there's some mod of an old GameCube game or a teenager's first game with scrappy art. And this is exactly why I love SAGE, because it's beholden to nobody. No corporate interest, no sponsors, not even any desire to be commercially viable in some cases. There's a shared energy and aesthetic here, but this is just raw, unfiltered Video Games.

And you can play most of it for yourself, too. Most of the games in that showcase have demo releases that you can find on the SAGE site proper, and a few are full releases, either recent or coinciding with the event. We've got the likes of excellent retro Castlevania-ish platformer LURRUNA - The Island of Towering Automatons, the currently crowdfunding 3D Sonic-inspired Lightspeed Lina, free arcade racer Hyperboard Extreme (which should be out today), plus the excellent Project Reignition, a fan-made remake of Sonic & The Secret Rings, as covered over on Time Extension. I'd be here all day if I were going to list everything that caught my eye in the showcase, but the reality is that I don't, and I've also got to dig into this heap of demos myself.

As for those worried about SEGA stepping in to shut things down, the event has even been shared before on some of their social media channels. They've even hired people from the Sonic fangame scene - the fantastic Sonic Mania was created by a team who worked on many a SAGE project. The event doesn't have many rules, but they do refuse to showcase fan-works that are crowdfunded, simply because that flies a little close to the legal sun. As such, they're not worried, and neither am I. May they continue unperturbed for years to come.

Check out 2026's SAGE Expo here, and you can find all current and past SAGE demos over on Sonic Fangames HQ here.