Boll Deluxe

Boll Deluxe is what happens when a fan game outgrows its premise. It started as Sonic Boll, a project putting Sonic into Mario levels, and the deluxe version turned that into something with a dozen playable characters, thirty-two remixed stages, special stages, a level editor and a four-player local battle mode. The joke — Sonic and Mario in the same engine — is the hook, but it is not what keeps people playing.

What keeps people playing is that the characters are not skins. Sonic carries momentum and wants long uninterrupted runs. Mario is precise and vertical. Tails flies, Knuckles climbs, Wario barges through things the others go around. Somari and Giana are in there as deep-cut jokes that still control properly. Because every character reads the same level differently, the campaign is effectively several campaigns, and the community's speedrunning scene grew out of exactly that.

It is built in GameMaker 8 — an engine that was old when the project started — and that shows in both directions. The good side is that it runs on anything, installs as a folder, and starts instantly. The bad side is that it needs DirectX 9 present on the machine, and versions from 2.1.5 onward will show visual glitches or crash outright without it. The team is currently rebuilding the game in a newer engine, which is why the itch.io page still says beta after several years of releases.

The multiplayer is local only: up to four players on one machine in a battle mode, no netplay. That is a real limitation, and it is the main reason this is a couch game rather than a party-across-the-internet game.

The thing to be honest about is what this is legally. Boll Deluxe uses Nintendo and Sega characters without permission. It is not a licensed product, it has no Game Content Usage Rules blessing behind it the way some fan revivals do, and fan games in this position have historically been taken down without warning. The team distributes it free on itch.io and has done so publicly for years, but that is not the same as being safe. We list it because it is genuinely well made and freely offered by its authors — and because if it does vanish, the case for cataloguing it while it exists gets stronger, not weaker.

If you grew up with either series, it is worth the 268 MB. It is polished, it is generous with content, it is moddable, and the level editor means the community keeps making more of it.