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A Long Lost Game Based On The Sonic Saturday Morning Cartoon?

Here's a new one, at least to myself. Apparently, Sega of America, the Sega Technical Institute to be exact, tried to produce a Sonic game themselves in the early/mid 90s. The promotional vid boasts a few key details, such as new movies, huge characters (well, for the Genesis I guess), fluid animation (yeah... but with those Saturday morning character designs?) and 3D movement (Metal Gear Solid styling sneaking?).

Check it out...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYRz3oWVEMQ

And for more info...

http://www.sega-16.com/Interview- Peter Morawiec.php
 
I read that a few weeks back im sure, but never noticed the sonic clip download at the bottom. It looks interesting to say the least.
 

D-X

Member
The backgrounds look very Comix Zone. There I was thinking there were no secrets left in the Sonic universe...
 
looks pretty good (suprisingly) but still way too slow, even for a slow sonic game.

i can see why this was killed, as it would have killed the Sonic brand even sooner. it's like something from current Sega.
 

BGBW

Maturity, bitches.
They should have based it on the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon.

C-aosth2.jpg
 
meltpotato said:
looks pretty good (suprisingly) but still way too slow, even for a slow sonic game.

i can see why this was killed, as it would have killed the Sonic brand even sooner. it's like something from current Sega.
I see it as being slow because it's being more of a tech demo than a game level. looks interesting, but not Sonic.
 

Ramune

Member
haircut said:
why was he always going on about chili dogs

Probably because of the "Sonic" fast food chain, which was probably an in-joke at the time. But that's a wonderfully awesome find. I've heard about this, but never knew there were actual video footage of it.

On a more related note, I remember Sega had quite a few Sonic features on their web site (95-97 ish) on Sonic (Sonic History for example). One feature that I still remember was about a game called Twisted Mattle. It was going to be published by Sega, but made from another developer starring Princess Sally. It was a PC game that was going to have a predominately female cast (Sally, Bunnie, and a few original cast members like a skunk girl with Native American clothes), as well as Sonic, Tails, Antoine, etc. I even had a couple of tech demos on my old PC (a town demo with Sonic stuck in ball form that you manipulated like a debug code; Sally in a desert level compete with haze effects), but alas that was a good 11 or so years ago and the HD had met with a virus. I'm having a heck of a time trying to even get info that that the game even existed now; as anything about it is pretty much gone. But I'm not surprised that Sega were trying to make a SatAM tie-in game. Heck, a few characters show up in Sonic Spinball. And if you look for Sonic X-treme info, some of the scenarios STI came up with even featured SatAM characters. This game would have definitely departed from the series roots, but it could have turned out neat like Tails Adventure or Chaotix (baring the lackluster good ending).
 
Great find. :lol

Ramune said:
Probably because of the "Sonic" fast food chain, which was probably an in-joke at the time. But that's a wonderfully awesome find. I've heard about this, but never knew there were actual video footage of it.

On a more related note, I remember Sega had quite a few Sonic features on their web site (95-97 ish) on Sonic (Sonic History for example). One feature that I still remember was about a game called Twisted Mattle. It was going to be published by Sega, but made from another developer starring Princess Sally. It was a PC game that was going to have a predominately female cast (Sally, Bunnie, and a few original cast members like a skunk girl with Native American clothes), as well as Sonic, Tails, Antoine, etc. I even had a couple of tech demos on my old PC (a town demo with Sonic stuck in ball form that you manipulated like a debug code; Sally in a desert level compete with haze effects), but alas that was a good 11 or so years ago and the HD had met with a virus. I'm having a heck of a time trying to even get info that that the game even existed now; as anything about it is pretty much gone. But I'm not surprised that Sega were trying to make a SatAM tie-in game. Heck, a few characters show up in Sonic Spinball. And if you look for Sonic X-treme info, some of the scenarios STI came up with even featured SatAM characters. This game would have definitely departed from the series roots, but it could have turned out neat like Tails Adventure or Chaotix (baring the lackluster good ending).

I want to see this.
 

lordmrw

Member
That video was actual pretty decent for the genesis, but the game itself from the looks of it would have completely defeated the purpose of it starring Sonic.
 
Ristar didn't have digitized Urkel voice samples like this probably would have.

Plus Ristar is a lot more fun that this probably would have been.
 
Sonic SatAM was my favourite childhood cartoon, and this game looked like it had some promising elements. I think the pseudo-3D style could have been really interesting if implemented correctly, and it would have provided a nice alternative to the fast-paced Sonic games.

FYI, after years of legal wrangling between Sega and DiC, the DVD sets have been released. If you have any fond memories of the cartoon, get out your rose tinted glasses and order the set here.
 
Ramune said:
One feature that I still remember was about a game called Twisted Mattle. It was going to be published by Sega, but made from another developer starring Princess Sally. It was a PC game that was going to have a predominately female cast (Sally, Bunnie, and a few original cast members like a skunk girl with Native American clothes), as well as Sonic, Tails, Antoine, etc. I even had a couple of tech demos on my old PC (a town demo with Sonic stuck in ball form that you manipulated like a debug code; Sally in a desert level compete with haze effects), but alas that was a good 11 or so years ago and the HD had met with a virus. I'm having a heck of a time trying to even get info that that the game even existed now; as anything about it is pretty much gone.

Twisted Mettle (as I believe it was spelled) was just an early fangame, one of the better ones for the time. I THINK I know who made it, but my memory is fuzzy and I don't want to name off the wrong person.

This is interesting. I've read written design docs for a SatAM-based Sonic game, but I didn't know an actual prototype (or at least visual mock-up) was produced. And wow, a Sonic Spinball and Comix Zone mock-up, as well.

Between him and Chris Senn, it's kind of sad to hear these developers talk fondly of their time from then, and show off these neat ideas and concepts they had to water down or can completely. You kind of wish they could get a second shot at things on today's hardware. (The DS at least.)
 

Crisis

Banned
That game looks ****ing god awful. Sonic games (minus the spinoffs) were supposed to be about speed and "blast processing". That looks unbelievably boring. Did anyone else notice how the screen advanced? For a Sonic game, that would've been unacceptable then and now. Good call, Sega.
 
SabinFigaro said:
FYI, after years of legal wrangling between Sega and DiC, the DVD sets have been released. If you have any fond memories of the cartoon, get out your rose tinted glasses and order the set here.

What were their problems?
 

Starfire

Member
Wow, that looks pretty cool, if not a little rough.

I always wished they'd made sort of a Prince of Persia esque puzzle game sortta simillar to that concept with some of the slower charecters in the Satam universe, then bring Sonic in inbetween levels for bosses/sub-bosses/blazing escapes etc..

So much awesome potential in the Satam universe never explored.
 

TreIII

Member
If this was heavily polished and Sega had the balls to see it through to completion, it could have been something interesting. Alas...

But still, really, one has to wonder...how did the likes of a game like this get aborted in the womb, while games like Sonic 3D Blast got to see the light of day?

Both games probably wouldn't have done much to continue the proud tradition of 16bit Sonic, but I could have seen me playing this game all the way through, as opposed to 3D Blast, which both gave me headaches and heartaches whenever I tried to play it...
 
Sonic + Battletoads + MGS = DO NOT WANT

I mean, it's very good looking, but it's not pushing my buttons. If nothing else, it could have been a better game than StH 2006.
 

Pachinko

Member
Sonic the hedghog has imagined by prince of persia/abe's oddysee. That's the vibe I got atleast , and it totally would have suited the purpose of being based on the show.
 

probune

Member
BGBW said:
They should have based it on the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon.

C-aosth2.jpg

That was the terrible cartoon, why would anyone want that?

This game looks like a really bad idea. So slow.
 
Barkley's Justice said:
i call bullshit on the vid. and if it is real, it was not promo'd on a genesis dev unit.


Most likely not, it was probably just a visual demo in the style and with some of the limitations of the Genesis designed into it (heck, the program they used itself may have been laggy at the time for what it was handling).

But the video is probably real. As I said before, Chris Senn has spoken up about some of the work he was doing for what eventually became Sonic Xtreme (and trust me, they explored a lot of different approaches and ideas), and some of the visual demos he's shown off have been surreal, but fascinating. This fits the mold with the more American concept of Sonic back then. (And it's fun to hear people say "That's not what the Sonic games were about!" when they were still defining what those games were about in that era. This mock-up probably post-dates Sonic 2, but not by much, given the time frame, the rise and fall of the Saturday morning cartoon it was based on, et cetera.)

Further prototype mockups of Comix Zone and Spinball make it even more likely to be legitimate. That's a lot of work, and to be cohesively presented too.
 

JamesE

Member
Man fort this is the last time I link you to cool shit on AIM and lose out on my Kotaku glory :(

Some context: This game is Sonic MARS, or at least the pitch for same. It was going to be an internal project to boost the 32x, but it died because... well, because STI seems to have been managed by chimps. On roller skates. Frank at Lost Levels mentioned the design document a while back, then it surfaced thanks to the mad crazies at Digital Penetr- I mean, Sonic-Cult.org, back in August. Don't go to that site, they are bad people. Fat stack of badly sketched plans done in pencil, the total antithesis of Hirokazu Yasuhara's lovely little instructive doodles (check the Japanese manuals in Sonic Jam to see what I mean, they're used to illustrate Zones). Basically the plan seems to have been to throw out everything that made Sonic great and replace it with the Americanised series. It seems pretty similar to the TMNT Battle Nexus game on GBA, if you want an extant example of the gameplay style.

The resources, and later Yasuhara, got folded into Sonic Xtreme, which is a whole other epic. Yash did some nice work towards the end of that, but it still doesn't feel as promising as his self-originated gameplay plans. If you google for Chris Senn's site he was kind enough to throw up an archive of material surrounding the development, and there's a nice historical piece on the project at Lost Levels dot org.

Seriously though, why the **** does nobody get that the Sonic games were all about a certain brand of GAMEPLAY? Crackdown's trippy neon runnyjumpyopolis has more to do with what Sonic embodied than say, Secret Rings.
 
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