One of our favourite gaming events - the Sonic Amateur Games Expo - returned once again this year with a wide selection of impressive games from talented developers. From resurrecting a cancelled Sega Saturn Sonic title to remaking Game Gear classic Sonic Chaos, the range of ideas and concepts on display this year is highly impressive - and best of all, every demo from the event is available to download.
There's a lot to work through here, but it's the release of a Sonic Z-Treme demo that may prove most interesting to many fans. It's an attempt to reconstruct the cancelled Sonic X-Treme for Saturn and to do so running on original hardware. It's something of an epic task since so little source material is out there: two failed prototypes are known to have existed on the 16-bit Mega Drive/Genesis while a third known as Sonic Mars was created for the 32X before eventually evolving into Sonic X-Treme. This was the infamous Sonic game that was supposed to help save the Sega Saturn, a system seller first shown to the public in a slick E3 1996 demo. However, the game never saw the light of day.
So, what happened? It's a long story involving sky-high ambitions, multiple teams and failures on the part of Sega management, but the traces of its existence have become the stuff of legend. Thanks to the tireless efforts of the Sonic community, several prototypes have been recovered, showcasing the game in various states of completion. The main programmer, Ofer Alon, was working primarily on PC hardware and struggled to deliver the required fluidity on the Saturn itself. Much to his chagrin - and that of lead designer Chris Senn - Sega management brought another team on board to handle Saturn programming duties, a developer known as Point of View, but this studio ultimately fared even worse.
from Eurogamer.net https://ift.tt/2NaSyPh
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