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3 weeks ago
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This was/is going to be a Youtube video probably sometime in the future as there is a lot to cover surrounding the ever infamous cancelled Sonic The Hedgehog game, Sonic X-treme.
Prototype box art of the supposed gameTo bring people up to speed for those who don’t know, Sonic X-treme was supposed to be Sonic’s first foray into the 3D Platformer genre and was supposed to be released in 1996 on the SEGA Saturn. However that never happened due to a long list of issues and its story is one of complex internal issues, technical issues and time constraints. I don’t want to focus on everything here as this post will an entire book if I did. What I do want to focus on though is its ties to internal issues at SEGA that effected its development.
Before talking about one aspect of turmoil surrounding the game, some context will be needed to understand why development of the game became so…complex.
Everyone knows that Sonic The Hedgehog and Sonic The Hedgehog 2 was developed by ‘Sonic Team’. But the game was actually developed in conjunction with 2 groups, ‘Sonic Team’ developers that came from Japan and the ‘SEGA Technical Institute’ (STI) that had developers here in America. Both games were developed at the Technical Institute’s headquarters located in San Francisco, California.
When Sonic 3 and Knuckles was being developed, most of the Sonic Team members separated themselves to develop the game while the Technical Institute members developed other games for the SEGA Genesis including Sonic spinoff games like Sonic Spinball. But here is where we start seeing a divide in SEGA’s main development team as after Sonic 3 and Knuckles was released, all Sonic Team members in America headed back to Japan presumably to work on a game for the upcoming SEGA Saturn (Sonic & Knuckles was released in 1994 and the SEGA Saturn released also that year).
According to what we know from both interviews and various books, there was a clear disconnect happening during this time internally between both SEGA of America and SEGA of Japan.
Before I go on, I’d like to emphasize that most of the information that I’m going to be talked about is very biased in its viewpoints. This is because most of the interviews we know about are from previous SEGA of America employees including legendary CEO Tom Kalinske. We have little to no information on the internal happenings at SEGA of Japan during this time as far as I know/understand. It is possible that there exists some ex-SEGA of Japan employee interview out there that can give us a glimpse into what the work culture was during the period but they have not been found/translated by the English gaming community at this time. Even skimming Japanese interviews about games released at the time, particularly NiGHTS Into Dreams, is a dead end because they talk about more of the game’s development and its struggles rather than internal company struggles and mention nothing about Sonic X-treme or the SEGA Technical Institute.
Again, it’s not that this information could be wrong but it’s very possible it could be incredibly skewed because of that lack of viewpoint from the Japanese side of the company.
