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Final build of Sonic Xtreme found, leaking as we speak
- Thread starter Krejlooc
- Start date
Dragoon En Regalia
Member
SEGA needs to wise up and make a Chao World game for every platform. They can always get Hashimoto back to work on the Chao AI he co-programmed before Luminous.
themagicalkitsune
Member
That's awesome. I hope some stuff will be uploaded to youtube.
There was a time a few years ago I thought we'll never see RE 1.5 and Sonic X-Treme leak. *wipes away a single tear*
Gosh, I'm only 18 and I already feel old, haha. Great news, anyway, even if game's unplayable. This finding is really valuable for gaming history. I wonder how would modern games look if X-Treme came out before Super Mario 64...
Gosh, I'm only 18 and I already feel old, haha. Great news, anyway, even if game's unplayable. This finding is really valuable for gaming history. I wonder how would modern games look if X-Treme came out before Super Mario 64...
If this becomes playable on a modern machine i wouldnt even care if it was good or not, just being able to run around some fisheye environments and jump a bit will be satisfying enough for me after all these years. Would probably play space queens in the background just to get the full effect
I thought they concluded that mystery with the XBLA versions?
APZonerunner
Member
They did, though not o the original intended standard, as that's largely impossible now. Cool easter egg, though. They even made SNS transfer into Nuts & Bolts, and very cheekily added NEW hooks in Tooie in case they ever do a future game.
FF Seraphim
Member
Holy shit so basically Yuji Naka killed sonic during the Saturn era.... wtf
Sega was clearly developing a 3D sonic game very late in the saturn's life, around 1998. The saturn died a very short death and that game shifted to the dreamcast and became Sonic Adventure. But you can imagine something like Sonic Adventure with Saturn graphics ala Sonic World in Sonic Jam and that's pretty much where Sonic would have gone had the Saturn remained a viable platform.
I don't think what they were creating with Naka's engine was looking right. The team originally requested the engine solely for the boss fights, and a higher up forced them to scrap their original game design and make the entire game like those boss fights. That's now what they intended, I think something more like this final version of Sonic Xtreme is what they wanted. As such, I don't think Sonic Xtreme was ever going to be a worthy Sonic game. Naka pretty much treated Sonic Xtreme the same way he treated Sonic Spinball - a wacky western spinoff until his real version arrived.
I think the lack of a major 3D sonic game -- any 3D sonic game -- is an enormous factor in the Saturn's failure in the west. While I doubt sonic Xtreme would have been a great game, I wonder if the mere appearance of a major 3D Sonic game to go up against Mario and Crash would have helped Sega much more than NiGHTS. Maybe it would have let the Saturn remain viable long enough for stuff like Shenmue or Sonic Adventure to come to the system. Who knows.
Early video of the NiGHTS version, btw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW_Pd-PTAtM
That video snippet posted above by Sora87 looks very good for the times when it was produced, too bad about the level design apparently being an unfinished clusterfuck. The engine seemed to implement some interesting new things.
That's like his most defining quality.
That's like his most defining quality.
You are doing something that is benefiting a lot of people who have wanted this game for a very long time now, myself included. This really is one of the biggest deals for me and thanks for making it a reality.
PeakPointMatrix
Member
This shit is so fascinating to me, you don't even know. One of my first all-nighters as a kid was reading up on the history of this game. Poor Chris Senn becoming ill from the horrific production schedules he was forced to do in an attempt to save this game.
You have a better chance of finding a more complete build of this game, but I'd totally love to see that if it were real!
And more importantly, I know it's barely anything, but I really can't wait to see a finished version of Sonic X-Treme! I mean, we'll never see anything more of the real deal, due to all of these issues that keep coming up, so it's going to have to mostly be fan-made, but I'm still excited by the fact we can actually play a game most of us thought would be nothing but a tale of the problems within Sega during the Saturn age.
Professor Beef
Banned
I wouldn't classify that as "wising up."
Honestly I could totally see Sega finishing up this game or just releasing it in some way. If any company would do something like that it would be them. They took a guy who made a Sega Genesis DS emulator and hired him to do Sonic Classic Collection.
Then they took two guys who were making a new engine for the classic games and had them create better versions of Sonic 1, 2, and Sonic CD, with widescreen support and added features.
So maybe a fan effort to make the game playable without the NV1 is coming along, maybe Sega swoops that up and offers the game on steam.
smfh
Dynamite Ringo Matsuri
Member
Holy wow. I still remember seeing those screenshots in Ultra Game Players. Can't believe this is actually seeing release
BumblebeeCody
Member
This is hype.
PeakPointMatrix
Member
The next goal should be to unearth the original version of Sonic 06. That development disaster is probably the most fascinating debacle after Sonic Xtreme. Funny how it's always the first 3D entry in a new generation that sparks some bullshit drama. It seems like Sonic Boom is about to fit the bill nicely too.
Zuhzuhzombie!!
Member
THIS DOES NOT RUN ON SEGA SATURN SYSTEMS.
It's been a long, weird road, but it looks like we finally have every bit of Sonic Xtreme ever worked on. A member of Sonic Retro and Assembler has his hands on Ofer's source code for Sonic Xtreme and has successfully built the binary, and is sending it out to a few people to test to make sure the game actually runs. In his possession is the final source, including source codes for the level editor and some files needed to turn your PC into a Dev Kit.
Some background on Sonic Xtreme, as many likely don't know the entire story. Sonic Xtreme was Sega of America's project while Sonic Team was working on NiGHTS, it was intended to be THE Sonic game for "next-gen" platforms. The roots of Sonic Xtreme trace back to the Genesis days, when Chris Senn originally pitched the game as an isometric scrolling game:
The game wasn't approved as is, but rather proposed to be moved to the then-in-development Sega 32X, under the name Sonic Mars. A pitch video, made on an Amiga 1200, has survived of what they envisioned Sonic Mars running as:
Mock-up of the pitch video, and the actual pitch-video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjuPHeNTcWs
The game was eventually OKed for the upcoming Sega Saturn, where it was positioned to be THE Sonic game for the system. Originally, the SoA team managed to get their hands on Yuji Naka's NiGHTS engine and had intended to use said engine for boss battles on the game:
Footage of the NiGHTS engine being used for bosses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ajuzf79476Y
Some executives saw this and demanded the entire game be made with this engine, scrapping an early-in-development normal-stage engine they were working on in the process. Eventually, a small test of this engine leaked as a binary that can run on stock saturns:
Early version of the engine, that has leaked. It continued being worked upon, because leaks like this have popped up online:
This version featured improved graphics, morphing ground (ala soft museum in NiGHTS), and a 3D sonic. Unfortunately, Yuji Naka got wind that they were using his prized engine, and threatened to leave sega unless they stopped using his work. Rather than lose Yuji Naka, SoA yanked the NiGHTS engine from the team, leaving them about a year into the project with absolutely nothing to show for it.
At this point, a third complete rewrite of the game began, and this is essentially the Sonic Xtreme everybody remembers:
Several years ago, Chris Senn, one of the lead developers for the game, leaked everything he still had of the project from this build. he revealed in the process that this build of the game was never running on a Saturn, but rather was a PC build of the game by Ofer Alon, the main programmer. Senn had everything from this build except the actual game engine, but that meant not only all the tiles and arts and assets, but also the actual level files. In 2010, SaNIK, at Sonic Retro, built a model viewer for these levels after a few guys, including myself, cracked the level format from these files. His viewer worked with OpenGL and let you clip through the levels and explore them as non-playable representations of the levels themselves. Senn couldn't release the engine as he didn't have access to it, but for the most part, we had everything related to Sonic Xtreme except the game itself.
Senn released the following videos proving the engine build still existed, though:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzvS_beXtXk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq_iPxQsbm0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IOd0mQ-uXE
interestingly, the final video states "Saturn version," which is odd because the game is a PC executable. That didn't make sense... until now.
Back in 1995, Sega launched the Sega PC initiative, which would have coincided with Sonic Xtreme's development. The heart of their initiative was a partnership with Nvidia to produce nvidia's first GPU, the NV1. The NV1 is a 3D accelerator video card that, unlike modern video cards, rendered in Quads rather than 3-pointed polygons, much like the saturn. The NV1 also includes Sega Saturn controller ports, and an audio processor making it an all-in-one card for playing Sega PC games. Only 5 games support the card - Virtua Fighter Remix, Battle Arena Toshinden, NASCAR, Panzer Dragoon, and a special version of Descent.
The full source for the above versions of Sonic Xtreme have finally leaked and been built. They use the NV1 SDK, which wasn't available to normal consumers of the NV1, to build, which essentially turned your Windows 95 box into a Sega Saturn development kit. Inside the source for this leak are stubs for a Sega Saturn build option. The game looks a good 70% complete, and includes the source for a level editor. The engine will only run on a Windows 95 machine with a Diamond Edge NV1.
Senn had long conceded that all the "levels" shown were thrown together in 10 minutes for the purpose of getting some screenshots out to magazines, and exploring SaNIK's model viewer made that obvious, as the levels are meandering without purpose. However, given how relatively complete the engine is, and that the game includes the source to the level editor itself, it wouldn't be out of the possibility for fans to actually complete this game. Next steps would have been finalizing the engine, building some levels, and programming some bosses.
The person behind the leak doesn't have an NV1 card himself, but he's built the binaries and is sending them my way to test on my NV1 card. Hopefully I can post some videos of the game running locally at my place soon enough. This is pretty exciting and essentially the holy grail of the Sonic Community. FINALLY Sonic Xtreme has been unearthed.
For me personally, this is the long culmination of years and years worth of research and leads and dead ends. I have personally been looking for this release since about 1999 when I first started speaking to people at Sega and past programmers about this. I had actually doubted we'd ever get our hands on Ofer's engine, this is an incredibly exciting time and I'm pretty honored to be the guinea pig to test this stuff out to confirm if the build is working.
Very exciting day, just so happened to coincide with a day I had taken off from work.
TSR,
I've known you for a LONG time.
I knew one day you would make this thread. Congrats.
A Black Falcon
Member
Very, very cool! I'm looking forward to seeing more of this, Sonic X-Treme is definitely an incredibly interesting project I'd LOVE to play someday!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_X-treme
No, that's not what happened. Chris Coffin started working on an engine to use in the games' bossfights. It created the round boss arenas seen in some videos. Meanwhile, Senn and Alon worked on the "levels" engine, with its fisheye lens.
Then SoA execs did this really stupid move: http://www.senntient.com/projects/xtreme/FAQ.html#pov
POV's results were poor. In March '96, the game was shown to Nakayama when he visited SoA, and the results were that infamous meeting:
So, they had to somehow redo the entire game into the "bosses" engine. Supposedly. Senn and Alon tried to pitch their version to Sega PC, but were turned down (internal politics, didn't want to approve something main Sega had rejected, etc.). After this Alon left Sega at some point in mid '96. IGN's article covers this.
Anyway, in April '96 Coffin's team was offered the NiGHTS engine, and wasted two weeks starting to convert the game over to that engine, before Yuji Naka heard and killed the project. Coffin had to ditch all the work on the NiGHTS-engine version and return to the old "bosses" engine and work on that again.
While it is possible that that test demo (as seen in the screenshots below) is of the NiGHTS-engine game, I'm doubtful -- the NiGHTS-engine phase of the project was quite short! It's much more likely, I think, that it is in fact the results of trying to make levels in the "bosses" engine, or a test in that direction at least. Coffin's team had to redo everything to make a whole game in that "bosses" engine that had originally been designed to only do small arenas like those seen in these E3 '96 demos, of course!
E3 '96 was in June, after the NiGHTS engine debacle in April. The game was shown, and several videos of boss-arena gameplay exist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aS9nAuyp_o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNgu35CmS5w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfeeGIHWc3E
I'm confused on one thing at this point, though -- E3 '96 trailers like this one show plenty of fisheye-lens gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlsMTEaZqTY ... and yet hadn't Senn and Alon's fisheye-lens engine been cancelled several months earlier? Was this stuff already redone in the bosses engine? This seems unlikely, though, when you look at the actual playable samples in the videos above, or the NiGHTS or Coffin test level below! Were they going to implement the fisheye lens into Coffin's "Project Condor" version of the game? Perhaps they were, it was a major feature of the game after all, but as we seem to know very little about Coffin's version, this is hard to say for sure I think... (Of course Senn and Alon kept working on their version, but given that Sega didn't seem to want it, putting footage of a game they weren't planning on releasing would be kind of odd. I'm sure I'm missing something here.)
Anyway, before and after E3 Coffin's team worked on making a whole game in the "bosses" engine, while Senn and Alon separately worked on their version, which they were dedicated enough to to keep working on for a while even though it'd been cancelled. Senn and Alon's version is the one with all the content leaks, including this one which is of Senn and Alon's game of course; again we've seen little of Coffin's versions, however far they got, either the original engine or NiGHTS, apart from that one leaked test demo level, and Youtube videos of the E3 showing.
http://www.ign.com/articles/2008/05/29/sonic-x-treme-revisited?page=2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_X-treme
No, that's not what happened. Chris Coffin started working on an engine to use in the games' bossfights. It created the round boss arenas seen in some videos. Meanwhile, Senn and Alon worked on the "levels" engine, with its fisheye lens.
Then SoA execs did this really stupid move: http://www.senntient.com/projects/xtreme/FAQ.html#pov
from Chris Senn's site said:
POV's results were poor. In March '96, the game was shown to Nakayama when he visited SoA, and the results were that infamous meeting:
POV was, of course, the "subcontracted developer" mentioned there. The whole thing was so stupid, and so easily avoided if Senn had been able to show Nakayama his CURRENT work on his engine... argh, and that move may have been the move that killed the game, too, because of all the additional work trying (and failing) to convert the whole game over to the "bosses" engine added. Such a dumb, dumb mistake!as described in the IGN article said:
So, they had to somehow redo the entire game into the "bosses" engine. Supposedly. Senn and Alon tried to pitch their version to Sega PC, but were turned down (internal politics, didn't want to approve something main Sega had rejected, etc.). After this Alon left Sega at some point in mid '96. IGN's article covers this.
Anyway, in April '96 Coffin's team was offered the NiGHTS engine, and wasted two weeks starting to convert the game over to that engine, before Yuji Naka heard and killed the project. Coffin had to ditch all the work on the NiGHTS-engine version and return to the old "bosses" engine and work on that again.
While it is possible that that test demo (as seen in the screenshots below) is of the NiGHTS-engine game, I'm doubtful -- the NiGHTS-engine phase of the project was quite short! It's much more likely, I think, that it is in fact the results of trying to make levels in the "bosses" engine, or a test in that direction at least. Coffin's team had to redo everything to make a whole game in that "bosses" engine that had originally been designed to only do small arenas like those seen in these E3 '96 demos, of course!
E3 '96 was in June, after the NiGHTS engine debacle in April. The game was shown, and several videos of boss-arena gameplay exist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aS9nAuyp_o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNgu35CmS5w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfeeGIHWc3E
I'm confused on one thing at this point, though -- E3 '96 trailers like this one show plenty of fisheye-lens gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlsMTEaZqTY ... and yet hadn't Senn and Alon's fisheye-lens engine been cancelled several months earlier? Was this stuff already redone in the bosses engine? This seems unlikely, though, when you look at the actual playable samples in the videos above, or the NiGHTS or Coffin test level below! Were they going to implement the fisheye lens into Coffin's "Project Condor" version of the game? Perhaps they were, it was a major feature of the game after all, but as we seem to know very little about Coffin's version, this is hard to say for sure I think... (Of course Senn and Alon kept working on their version, but given that Sega didn't seem to want it, putting footage of a game they weren't planning on releasing would be kind of odd. I'm sure I'm missing something here.)
Anyway, before and after E3 Coffin's team worked on making a whole game in the "bosses" engine, while Senn and Alon separately worked on their version, which they were dedicated enough to to keep working on for a while even though it'd been cancelled. Senn and Alon's version is the one with all the content leaks, including this one which is of Senn and Alon's game of course; again we've seen little of Coffin's versions, however far they got, either the original engine or NiGHTS, apart from that one leaked test demo level, and Youtube videos of the E3 showing.
Wrong. If the timeline on Wikipedia is accurate, it's quite impossible for this to be the NiGHTS engine. It's Coffin's bosses engine. Looks similar, but is different underneath because Naka was being stupid.
Nah, it wasn't scrapped; it was cancelled, but Senn and Alon worked on it more anyway, which is where this leak came from, that work. But I described this already.Krejlooc said:
I know I said this already, but my guess would be that this is an early test of making levels in Coffin's "bosses" engine, not actually something running in the actual NiGHTS engine. Senn said that two weeks were lost working on converting stuff over to the NiGHTS engine; even though it's basic, that prototype seems farther along than that. Of course, since Senn's version is much better-known and more complete than Coffin's, because of Senn's prominence in the community over the years while Coffin has said pretty much nothing as far as I know, it's hard to say much for sure about that version... but that's my guess, anyway.Eventually, a small test of this engine leaked as a binary that can run on stock saturns:
Early version of the engine, that has leaked. It continued being worked upon, because leaks like this have popped up online:
This version featured improved graphics, morphing ground (ala soft museum in NiGHTS), and a 3D sonic. Unfortunately, Yuji Naka got wind that they were using his prized engine, and threatened to leave sega unless they stopped using his work. Rather than lose Yuji Naka, SoA yanked the NiGHTS engine from the team, leaving them about a year into the project with absolutely nothing to show for it.
MoGamesXNA
Unconfirmed Member
.
This was really a showcase and impressive looking on Saturn, for sure. Imagining a whole game based on this engine... *sigh*
PeakPointMatrix
Member
This is an interesting tid-bit too since the original Dreamcast release of SA still has some leftover models from the Saturn version of the game in the Sky Chase sequences:
.jpg)
Early Footage:
Yoshi
Headmaster of Console Warrior Jugendstrafanstalt
Sonic Lost World is the first Sonic game of the current generation. Mega Drive, Dreamcast and Wii U actually were lucky with their "first Sonic games of the generation" (the games being fun to play), if you compare with PS360 last gen and Saturn (the games being horrific or not even being released).
Seeing how Naka's bad behaviour resulted in Sonic 2 being incredibly good and him shunning all the right games, like Sonic Spinball, I'm not sure he is actually to blame too much. Anyway, while I remain sceptic regarding the quality of Xtreme, as a Sonic-fan I'm happy to see it unearthed and would like to play it, at least once for the novelty.
No, this would be the 12 layers of parallax version of Sonic 1 debuted at CES when the game was actually unveiled. This version:
There is evidence Sega still has various Sonic 1 prototypes, though. A mobile phone port in 2003 appears to be built off of a build from a few months before release, as it still includes the rolling ball object that has been deleted in the final build, and it has the sprites for the marble zone UFOs in the marble zone tiles.
That's not the early build we're discussing, though. The build in question was only 1 level, a very early proto greenhill zone. As I said, it featured 12 layers of parallax, both in front and behind Sonic.
Krejlooc, you seem to be very knowledgeable about Sonic stuff, so let me ask you a question:
In the user manual for the original Genesis Sonic, it mentioned a power-up that appeared on the bonus stages that give you an extra-life (a block with a picture of Sonic's face). But in the game, that power-up never appears.
Do you know if that power-up was from an early version?
This has been bugging me since 1991...
(sorry to go a bit off-topic)
Wow this is truly incredible... don't know why but i'm more hyped about this than RE1.5 and i never liked SEGA stuff that much...
Congrats krejlooc I'm very happy for you, now i wish that somewhere out there there is a Nintendo version of you that is doing the same thing for Zelda Ura (Zelda 64DD).
Oh and don't worry about people's expectations, i don't really think that nowadays anyone has ever thought this was going to be a good game and this is not even the final game but an early build/proof of concept of the engine
I have a question though, the song in the first two videos (the ones labeled PC) is pretty great, do you guys know what it is from?
Congrats krejlooc I'm very happy for you, now i wish that somewhere out there there is a Nintendo version of you that is doing the same thing for Zelda Ura (Zelda 64DD).
Oh and don't worry about people's expectations, i don't really think that nowadays anyone has ever thought this was going to be a good game and this is not even the final game but an early build/proof of concept of the engine
I have a question though, the song in the first two videos (the ones labeled PC) is pretty great, do you guys know what it is from?
Space Queens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmaDfHU303E
Trench: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGW8aYaYQFY
Both tunes were created just for the Sonic Xtreme promos.
Thank you *bows*
lostinblue
Banned
The very same.
Its a leftover from some early build yeah, I guess they decided to delete it at the later builds. You could implement it again though hacking, because its still in the dats.
Android18a
Member
This stuff is all so fascinating. I love the history and digging up of old, unreleased prototypes and games.
Yeah, it's incredible that all we got for Saturn was ports from Mega Drive games, a "racing" spinoff and the prototype of the proper Saturn Sonic game being worked by Sonic Team (Sonic World in Sonic Jam).
Boaty McBoatface
Member
Terrible_Majesty
Member
PJ Phil!
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