Sonic the Hedgehog (1991) prototype discovered

Holy shit.

 

Wow.

It's funny making Sonic jump like he's Mario at the end of levels like he's Mario and Splats jumping through the moving floor into a pit of lava.

 

I thought linking roms was against rules here.

Better take it before someone notice.

 

Nice find!!

 

Sadly not the 1990 tokyo toy show build of sonic 1 but this is still a great find!

 

It was released publicly, so it's okay.

 

man i'm so happy with this, i thought there would never be any prototype of this game, at least one, honestly i really wish we had the 1990 tokyo toy build, but that's probably lost, well i can dream

 

Labyrinth zone's background looks way cooler in the beta than the tiles they used for the final version, what happened!?

 

Copyright violations are ok if you do them in public? What does that even mean? Aren't most rom sites public?

 

My favourite zone in Sonic 1 is Clock Ork Zone

All jokes aside though, this is definitely quite cool

 

Ehhh, I doubt it. Yuji Naka couldn't even find the toy show demo anymore when he tried to find it. Maybe they lost the source to that too, and the build is just permanently lost.

 

uff.. amy on the road ! and now 3D


finchef !!

....







a rework from 1;2;3 games ?

Öhm the original .vers of sonic 31 is ?

 

Can someone pls tell me what's so special about this?

 

This is Sega we're talking about. Not Nintendon't

 

There is no link to any rom here.

 

The opening post covers some of the differences between this and the final released version.

Generally though Sonic (a fairly important computer game in the history of such things) did not spring fully formed onto the world. Various demo builds, magazine screenshots, video and whatnot were released during development that did not make the final cut (sometimes for gameplay, sometimes for budget, sometimes for other reasons).
However between said screenshots, the stuff left behind in various versions of the ROM* and leaked code in various forms over the years then hackers have managed to piece together and remake bits of it for this and its sequel (Sonic 2 on the megadrive probably being one of the more extensively contemplated games out there for this sort of thing http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/186/ -- Resident Evil probably being the only franchise to stand a chance of having had as much attention and those guys are crazy, guy on the previous link also having something of a playlist of Resident Evil related things if you are interested in the stuff they went in for). If indeed the list of changes above is what it is then it also provides something of an insight into how the game was designed which is also of interest to many; if an idea was added later in development but went on to become a key feature then that is valuable info, and this being the first then features later dropped could also be a thing. In some games it can also show how the devs wanted it to be before the publisher wandered in and said it must be playable by quadriplegic and comatose 4 year olds, had to play to regional censors ( https://tanookisite.com/nintendo-censorship/ ), or indeed this being the 8-16 bit era then the pubs wandering in and saying "the kids like hard games and we don't want them to rent it/trade it in after 2 weeks" make it so.

*prior to the PS1 most console games were written in assembly. This means if you deleted a bunch of stuff you could not just recompile and go from there with the old stuff now gone. To that end devs would often just note the sections in question as being effectively blank space, try to make sure there was no way to access them during normal play and leave the data there.
https://tcrf.net/The_Cutting_Room_Floor
https://www.unseen64.net/
https://hiddenpalace.org/
Those being three of the better known sites dedicated to finding and archiving such things, the former not caring so much for things from magazines and videos and instead being more about actual code. Most ROM hacking websites (which includes this place and romhacking.net linked above for a patch) are also not averse to playing around with such things.

Anyway hope that serves as a brief intro to why game prototypes, betas and information thereon is often sought, examined and shared onwards.

 

Wow, can’t wait for the reactions of people in 30 years when they load up the “final” product of Cyberpunk 2077 lol

 

Always awesome to see another prototype come out and a hotly desired one no less. Also watch near the end of the twitch stream for Sonic to bring in the new year by bringing an end to a certain internet plugin...