Marathon Recompiled 1.0: Sonic ’06 Gets a Native PC Port on Its 20th Birthday

Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), the game Sonic fans have spent twenty years arguing about, now runs natively on PC. Marathon Recompiled 1.0 landed on GitHub on 14 November, exactly 20 years after the game first launched on Xbox 360, and it brings Sonic, Shadow and Silver to Windows, Linux, macOS and the Steam Deck.

It is not an emulator and it is not a remake. The team has taken the Xbox 360 game’s own code and turned it into a proper PC program, the same trick that gave us the brilliant Sonic Unleashed PC port last year.

What is Marathon Recompiled?

According to the project’s GitHub page, Marathon Recompiled is an unofficial PC port of the Xbox 360 version of Sonic ’06, built by static recompilation. Two tools, XenonRecomp and XenosRecomp, convert the game’s original PowerPC code and Xenos shaders into C++ and HLSL that a modern PC understands. The team credits N64: Recompiled (the tech behind Zelda 64: Recompiled) as the inspiration, and thanks the Unleashed Recompiled developers for much of the groundwork.

The project is led by ga2mer, with IsaacMarovitz and squidbus on graphics and Hyper building the system features, including achievement support and custom menus. Skyth helped with support for dynamic aspect ratios, so widescreen setups are covered.

Bugs and all (unless you say otherwise)

Here is the twist. The bugs that made Sonic ’06 famous are kept on purpose. The developers say bugs from the original hardware are intentionally preserved, and bug reports about them will be rejected unless you can show footage proving the problem does not happen on a real Xbox 360.

If you would rather not fall through the floor quite so often, there is a get-out. Marathon Recompiled includes many optional fixes for the original game’s bugs “and other annoyances”, switched on in the config file or a hidden debug menu. To find it, press Up, Down, Left, Right on the title screen: a jingle plays and a new section appears in Options.

What you need

No game files come with it. You need your own copy of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) for Xbox 360, retail disc or digital, and you dump it yourself from your console’s storage or with a compatible disc drive. The DLC is optional. The PlayStation 3 version will not work, although the team says the main PS3 differences have been added as options.

Part	Minimum
CPU	64-bit with AVX (Intel 2nd gen Core, AMD FX) or 64-bit ARM
GPU	Direct3D 12, Vulkan 1.2 or Metal 3 (GeForce GT 630, Radeon HD 7750, Intel HD 510, Apple M1)
Memory	8 GB
Storage	6 GiB
OS	Windows 10 (1909), modern Linux, macOS 15

Steam Deck owners should grab the x86-64 Flatpak. One catch: the file picker will not open in Game Mode until you have booted into Desktop Mode at least once, so it is easiest to do the whole install there. Intel and AMD users are told to update their graphics drivers first, as old ones can cause crashes and glitches.

The team is firm that builds should only come from the official Releases page, and never from Discord servers, other websites or third-party update tools.

Our take

Sonic ’06 was never going to be anyone’s favourite, but it is a big part of Sonic history, and until now playing it meant an Xbox 360, a PS3 or wrestling with PS3 emulation on PC. A native port that keeps the original faithfully broken, with an opt-in fix list for the rest of us, is a smart way to preserve it. It also lands in a big month for the blue blur, hot on the heels of Sega’s 35th anniversary short, Memories and Beyond.

Will you be braving Soleanna again with the fixes on, or the full 2006 experience? Tell us in the comments.