Post by tuanpingas on May 22, 2016 14:40:55 GMT
Sonic X-treme was a canceled platform video game in the Sonic the Hedgehog series. Developed by Sega Technical Institute (STI), X-treme was designed to capitalize on the success of Sega's mascot character by being the first fully 3D Sonic game and the first original Sonic title developed for the Sega Saturn. During the course of development, several different styles of gameplay were tried and the plot of the game changed several times.
Originally pitched as a two-dimensional platform game for the Sega Genesis, the game was eventually moved to development on the Saturn and for PC, intended for release during the holiday season of 1996. However, X-treme became stuck in development hell after several incidents, including an unfavorable visit by Sega of Japan executives and issues with acquiring a game engine, made the deadline difficult to achieve. After two of the lead programmers for the project became ill, the game was eventually canceled. Reviewers and video game journalists have retrospectively considered the possibility of what Sonic X-treme could have done for the Saturn had it been released, including comparisons to competing mascot video games Super Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot.
Sonic X-treme was originally intended to be developed for several other game systems prior to the Sega Saturn. In its earliest conception, the game was set to be released on the Sega Genesis and later on the 32X, under the name Sonic Mars (based on the codename for the 32X, Sega Mars). However, it was quickly decided that the game would require much more powerful hardware to cope with the new engine, and for commercial reasons, the release of a Sonic game on the new Sega Saturn console was a necessity.
Sonic X-treme was eventually canceled because of many internal problems related to Sega's corporate structure. The game was being developed by Sega Technical Institute (STI), a U.S.-based developer that had worked on games such as Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Sonic Spinball and Comix Zone.
Game designer Christina "Chris" Coffin was hired by Sega and tasked with creating the separate boss level portions of the game that was suggested to use a different viewpoint from the main game. Ofer Alon and Chris Senn continued their work on the main game in parallel with her Sonic X-treme boss engine. Coffin developed all boss engine work on the Sonic Mars hardware prototype initially before it was decided that Sega needed to make a Sonic game for the Sega Saturn.
For the boss level engine, several modes such as top-down and side scrolling views were prototyped to create a more interesting view of the boss battle areas while still using the pre-rendered Sonic sprite assets used in the main game engine developed by Ofer. Ofer continued developing the main game editor tools and engine code on the Mac and PC. Development picked up again and it seemed the game's deadline for release would be met after all. From a code standpoint the boss engine and main game were basically two games developing at the same time that shared some global memory to remember game state and use a process called "executable chaining" to switch from the main game to boss levels and back.
The boss engine never used the NiGHTS engine, and never saw any code, tools or assistance from Sonic Team. Even one of AM1's own arcade teams from Japan that was transplanted to the offices of STI and developed Dynamite Deka (known as Die Hard Arcade) was not privileged with any such knowledge or special support. Teams had to pretty much fend for themselves, which was evidenced by almost nonexistent third-party tools and support network for Saturn at that time. A few months into Coffin's involvement in Sonic X-treme, the studio director Roger Hector showed Coffin a playable pre-release level of NiGHTS. Coffin fell in love with the game's look and feel of NiGHTS for Sonic X-treme's boss levels, which may be why Yuji Naka himself threatened to quit Sega several months later because he assumed the Sonic X-treme team had been given access to his game's source code and art; this was not the case (Naka is very well known to have had an extreme passion toward NiGHTS, one time claiming that one of the game endings had induced tears in his eyes). The boss level engine began to evolve into a game of its own using this new source of inspiration, trying to stay closer to its 2D roots by adopting a 3D but side-scrolling viewpoint seen in games like Klonoa, Pandemonium, and NiGHTS, which was more fluid and lent itself to the fast moving gameplay of previous Sonic titles. The new boss engine gameplay prototype adopted a more pastel color scheme and organic flow of the inspirational NiGHTS game, and this caused some divided opinions amongst team members that felt originality was being sacrificed.
At one point, Coffin was briefly toyed with the idea of Amy Rose as a playable character, so she modified all the sprites of Sonic to look like Amy, except for Spin Dash, Spin Slash, Spin Jump and running sprites. The music and sound effects used in the boss engine came from the Japanese version of Sonic CD.
While Chris Senn and Ofer Alon tried porting the game to the Saturn, they encountered some problems, like the game running in 3-4 FPS with 4 colors and crashes. Point of View studio was recruited to continue technical development of the game, porting an older version of the game to the Saturn (now known as build v40) but encountering the same problems that Senn & Alon encountered. Some time after this, Ofer Alon was taken off the project. According to Senn, STI management viewed Alon as a maverick who did not follow company politics and did little to direct the other programmers. POV became the main developers, and to demonstrate to Ofer and Senn the reason for the drastic action, technical director Robert Morgan showed them a demo created by Point of View. Senn recalled, "They showed us the Sonic sprite we were already using floating in the upper-right of the screen, a checkerboard ground, a rotating shaded polygonal shape floating in the air and maybe a ring sprite animating. For all that we had created, to throw all that away for such nonsense. Amazing." After seeing this, Alon and Senn separated from POV & continued developing Sonic X-treme as a PC game. As known from the last leak of Sonic X-treme, POV made their own engine, with a completely different source code.
Sega of Japan meddled once again, as representatives came over to check on the game's progress. They were disappointed by the progress on the main game engine, as POV showed them a broken effort to port an older version of the engine (which is known now as v40), but were so impressed by the boss engine that they requested the entire game be made on that instead, as "Project Condor". By now the team was running short on men, and as Point of View had not gotten much farther than their initial demo, it all had fallen on the Sonic Xtreme Project Team to finish it up before the Christmas deadline so as to go up against both Super Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot alongside NiGHTS. A major change in this project is replacing the pre-rendered Sonic sprite with a 3D model, made by Kunitake Aoki from Sega of Japan. Coffin, who had been working nonstop to get this project out, came down with pneumonia. Since Coffin was leading the technology end and creating the engine, the loss caused the project to be indefinitely delayed and Mike Wallis informed management that the team could not continue and the game would not be released in time for Christmas. The project was officially canceled. Sega of America decided to discontinue both the Saturn and PC versions and switched to an alternative project: a Saturn port of Sonic 3D Blast/Flickies' Island.
Even though they had been removed from the project, Chris Senn (who was also suffering severe medical issues as a result of Sonic X-treme) and Ofer Alon continued to work on the engine and the textures used for the levels. Creating another presentation, the two showed off their work to the PC division of Sega with the hope that the game would be released on PC, where it always worked at the proper framerate.
The management declined to take it on, citing it was not in their budget to finance a new game, preferring to stick with ports of existing Sega titles. While Chris Senn believed the real reasons were just more internal politics at Sega because of Nakayama's distaste for the shoddy port of Ofer's work, the end result was still the same. Ceasing work on Sonic X-treme, Ofer left the company, thus putting an end to the Sonic X-treme development saga.
Videos:
- Vocal documentary:
- Project Condor early prototype gameplay:
- Some of old W.I.Ps, provided by Chris Senn:
In 2014, Jollyroger, a member from ASSEMblergames, found materials from POV's works. By his and fellow Sonic Retro member Andrew75's efforts, the POV's prototype was ported to Windows 7 (and above) and Sega Saturn, and is fully playable.
Originally pitched as a two-dimensional platform game for the Sega Genesis, the game was eventually moved to development on the Saturn and for PC, intended for release during the holiday season of 1996. However, X-treme became stuck in development hell after several incidents, including an unfavorable visit by Sega of Japan executives and issues with acquiring a game engine, made the deadline difficult to achieve. After two of the lead programmers for the project became ill, the game was eventually canceled. Reviewers and video game journalists have retrospectively considered the possibility of what Sonic X-treme could have done for the Saturn had it been released, including comparisons to competing mascot video games Super Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot.
Sonic X-treme was originally intended to be developed for several other game systems prior to the Sega Saturn. In its earliest conception, the game was set to be released on the Sega Genesis and later on the 32X, under the name Sonic Mars (based on the codename for the 32X, Sega Mars). However, it was quickly decided that the game would require much more powerful hardware to cope with the new engine, and for commercial reasons, the release of a Sonic game on the new Sega Saturn console was a necessity.
Sonic X-treme was eventually canceled because of many internal problems related to Sega's corporate structure. The game was being developed by Sega Technical Institute (STI), a U.S.-based developer that had worked on games such as Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Sonic Spinball and Comix Zone.
Game designer Christina "Chris" Coffin was hired by Sega and tasked with creating the separate boss level portions of the game that was suggested to use a different viewpoint from the main game. Ofer Alon and Chris Senn continued their work on the main game in parallel with her Sonic X-treme boss engine. Coffin developed all boss engine work on the Sonic Mars hardware prototype initially before it was decided that Sega needed to make a Sonic game for the Sega Saturn.
For the boss level engine, several modes such as top-down and side scrolling views were prototyped to create a more interesting view of the boss battle areas while still using the pre-rendered Sonic sprite assets used in the main game engine developed by Ofer. Ofer continued developing the main game editor tools and engine code on the Mac and PC. Development picked up again and it seemed the game's deadline for release would be met after all. From a code standpoint the boss engine and main game were basically two games developing at the same time that shared some global memory to remember game state and use a process called "executable chaining" to switch from the main game to boss levels and back.
The boss engine never used the NiGHTS engine, and never saw any code, tools or assistance from Sonic Team. Even one of AM1's own arcade teams from Japan that was transplanted to the offices of STI and developed Dynamite Deka (known as Die Hard Arcade) was not privileged with any such knowledge or special support. Teams had to pretty much fend for themselves, which was evidenced by almost nonexistent third-party tools and support network for Saturn at that time. A few months into Coffin's involvement in Sonic X-treme, the studio director Roger Hector showed Coffin a playable pre-release level of NiGHTS. Coffin fell in love with the game's look and feel of NiGHTS for Sonic X-treme's boss levels, which may be why Yuji Naka himself threatened to quit Sega several months later because he assumed the Sonic X-treme team had been given access to his game's source code and art; this was not the case (Naka is very well known to have had an extreme passion toward NiGHTS, one time claiming that one of the game endings had induced tears in his eyes). The boss level engine began to evolve into a game of its own using this new source of inspiration, trying to stay closer to its 2D roots by adopting a 3D but side-scrolling viewpoint seen in games like Klonoa, Pandemonium, and NiGHTS, which was more fluid and lent itself to the fast moving gameplay of previous Sonic titles. The new boss engine gameplay prototype adopted a more pastel color scheme and organic flow of the inspirational NiGHTS game, and this caused some divided opinions amongst team members that felt originality was being sacrificed.
At one point, Coffin was briefly toyed with the idea of Amy Rose as a playable character, so she modified all the sprites of Sonic to look like Amy, except for Spin Dash, Spin Slash, Spin Jump and running sprites. The music and sound effects used in the boss engine came from the Japanese version of Sonic CD.
While Chris Senn and Ofer Alon tried porting the game to the Saturn, they encountered some problems, like the game running in 3-4 FPS with 4 colors and crashes. Point of View studio was recruited to continue technical development of the game, porting an older version of the game to the Saturn (now known as build v40) but encountering the same problems that Senn & Alon encountered. Some time after this, Ofer Alon was taken off the project. According to Senn, STI management viewed Alon as a maverick who did not follow company politics and did little to direct the other programmers. POV became the main developers, and to demonstrate to Ofer and Senn the reason for the drastic action, technical director Robert Morgan showed them a demo created by Point of View. Senn recalled, "They showed us the Sonic sprite we were already using floating in the upper-right of the screen, a checkerboard ground, a rotating shaded polygonal shape floating in the air and maybe a ring sprite animating. For all that we had created, to throw all that away for such nonsense. Amazing." After seeing this, Alon and Senn separated from POV & continued developing Sonic X-treme as a PC game. As known from the last leak of Sonic X-treme, POV made their own engine, with a completely different source code.
Sega of Japan meddled once again, as representatives came over to check on the game's progress. They were disappointed by the progress on the main game engine, as POV showed them a broken effort to port an older version of the engine (which is known now as v40), but were so impressed by the boss engine that they requested the entire game be made on that instead, as "Project Condor". By now the team was running short on men, and as Point of View had not gotten much farther than their initial demo, it all had fallen on the Sonic Xtreme Project Team to finish it up before the Christmas deadline so as to go up against both Super Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot alongside NiGHTS. A major change in this project is replacing the pre-rendered Sonic sprite with a 3D model, made by Kunitake Aoki from Sega of Japan. Coffin, who had been working nonstop to get this project out, came down with pneumonia. Since Coffin was leading the technology end and creating the engine, the loss caused the project to be indefinitely delayed and Mike Wallis informed management that the team could not continue and the game would not be released in time for Christmas. The project was officially canceled. Sega of America decided to discontinue both the Saturn and PC versions and switched to an alternative project: a Saturn port of Sonic 3D Blast/Flickies' Island.
Even though they had been removed from the project, Chris Senn (who was also suffering severe medical issues as a result of Sonic X-treme) and Ofer Alon continued to work on the engine and the textures used for the levels. Creating another presentation, the two showed off their work to the PC division of Sega with the hope that the game would be released on PC, where it always worked at the proper framerate.
The management declined to take it on, citing it was not in their budget to finance a new game, preferring to stick with ports of existing Sega titles. While Chris Senn believed the real reasons were just more internal politics at Sega because of Nakayama's distaste for the shoddy port of Ofer's work, the end result was still the same. Ceasing work on Sonic X-treme, Ofer left the company, thus putting an end to the Sonic X-treme development saga.
Videos:
- Vocal documentary:
- Project Condor early prototype gameplay:
- Some of old W.I.Ps, provided by Chris Senn:
In 2014, Jollyroger, a member from ASSEMblergames, found materials from POV's works. By his and fellow Sonic Retro member Andrew75's efforts, the POV's prototype was ported to Windows 7 (and above) and Sega Saturn, and is fully playable.