Actually, what happened was that Taxman initially tried to pitch a Sonic CD iPhone port through certain connections and met with little-to-no success, until SEGA community reps, after the company had recently released an emulated version of a different game on iPhone, coincidentally asked the fans what games they'd like to see brought to iPhone. Especially because they hadn't actually qualified the question by explicitly stating that they meant that they were going to release more emulated games, this presented the perfect opportunity to make a big push to get SEGA to pick up the Sonic CD project by responding directly to the call with a publicized version of his pitch video. Once the video was out, all channels were flooded by requests for this version of Sonic CD accompanied by multiple links back to the video

This ultimately led to Taxman being heard out long enough to produce a demonstration build that was larger and more fully-featured than the one shown in the video. I helped him prepare this by doing some reverse-engineering and data gathering for some certain parts, but I wasn't yet involved in working directly with Retro Engine; my involvement had to stop once the project had finally been approved, since the whole deal was shaky in the first place and two developers would only complicate things. The biggest selling point for Taxman even being considered was that Sonic CD was a SegaCD game, and therefore was much more of a pain to emulate, especially since SEGA did not already own rights to any SegaCD emulation software (that I know of), and even if they did, there's no way it would run this well on mobile

During that time, Taxman worked directly with the mobile department of Sega of America, and was able to develop a good working relationship with them at the same time as actually providing them with a quality product. It's only through that that they became acquainted with him and his work, and it was enough to open up communication and mutual respect with that particular branch of the company

Fast-forward about two years for the completion of Sonic CD, and you get to the stage at which Taxman was concerned with what was happening next. Naturally, more Sonic was of interest, and he and I had already been discussing the prospect of working on Sonic 1, if nothing else. This time, there was potential for me be directly involved from start to finish because after having built up a trust with SOA Mobile, they would be willing to hear what he had to say about someone who he thought would cut down production time and maintain quality. Sometime during this period, we found out that, unsurprisingly, SEGA overall planned to release an emulated version of Sonic 1 for Android to compliment the one already available for iOS. Taxman discussed with SOA Mobile the possibility of supplanting it with a Retro Engine port produced by the two of us, and they began a push to get that to happen. As these things tend to do, the process took several months of back-and-forth, padded out with delays due to other projects the company at-large had going on. Some believed we had it in us to make it worthwhile, others had to be convinced. Again, a well-featured demonstration build was produced before any promises were made or any money was paid. After a full year, we were able to actually start to work under contract. Also, it may as well be said now that in addition to this being a major reason that we got the mobile releases of Sonic 1 and Sonic 2, this would logically also be the reason that mobile ports have been prioritized over console/PC/whatever - while Sonic CD had rarely ever been ported to anything, these two games already exist on almost every platform under the sun. They didn't yet exist on Android, and the poor performance of the iOS versions was just begging to be remedied. That's not to say that anything is or isn't happening; I'm just stating the obvious in regard to the current situation

Even having made it that far, these do still happen to be pre-existing games that are major entries in the company's flagship IP. We're still subject to scrutiny, occasionally intense. Some would put a large amount of faith in us due to on-going success, while others are more conservative. It's not exactly open season for us to do whatever we please no matter how good and/or careful we are

A bit long, but the moral of the story is - we didn't just have the reigns handed over to us. There were opportunities to take advantage of, and we made the best of them. Now, the relationship we've formed with the company has to be actively maintained through dialog, hard work, and compromise