Sonic cd sprites12/18/2023 ![]() And this was christmas 1993, apparently 2 years after this demo was made. My parents threw a big christmas party with all the extended family (like 20 aunts and uncles and their kids) and they all would come into my bedroom to see sewer shark, and flip their shit. While I played Sonic CD non-stop of course, Sewer Shark was actually the show stopper. I remember when I got my Sega CD, obviously I got Sonic CD with it, but it also came packed with Sewer Shark. Hearing that kind of music coming out of a video game console was pretty insane. Yes, seeing full motion video on a console back then was very impressive. It's all just kept locked up in Nintendo's vaults. Nintendo no doubt have literally everything archived so none of the early builds of SMW have actually been lost (hell, some of the unused SMW content actually ended up in the GBA version's code too). Hell, they even keep a full and complete archive of not only their own games, but also the games of all third party developers who have ever submitted builds to Nintendo for testing and manufacturing! (Case in point? Trials of Mana's English localisation could only happen thanks to Nintendo providing the code for all the different in-development versions of the original Seiken Densetsu 3 - That's why Collection of Mana remained exclusive to Switch, the code was Nintendo's property - fun fact, the actual retail Collection of Mana also contains various beta and debug versions of Trials of Mana hidden within its code!) They were the only major Japanese developer/publisher that really kept complete archives, dating all the way back to when they first starting making electronic games (hell, they actually just released a previously un-released English version of Sky Skipper, a game from 1981 that was apparantly lost to time until it got a surprise release on Switch last year!) They've kept literally everything (barring a few things that were accidentally lost, like the original Link's Awakening source code - evidenced by how LADX shows signs of having been reverse engineered from a retail ROM of the original B&W LA), they even kept all of their original paper-based level design documentation and design documents! (They actually do make these public on occasion, as was the case when they released Starfox 2 on the SNES mini). Worth noting that Nintendo are the best archivists in the entire industry. I say literally, because people have been doing that, making new fan games out of lost content, for years now. There has been quite literally enough lost content that has been found over the years to fill out an entire game's worth of stuff. I feel like Sonic Crackers was the epitome of that. Sonic development just feels outright mysterious, like a treasure chest of unseen things. The tentpole releases of this scene always seem to hinge on that factor - if they can show the public something they've never seen before. It was more like "holy shit, THAT is where this screenshot comes from!" kinds of moments.Īlthough, to be sure, the Simon Wai prototype also was amazing because of all the stuff we didn't have pictures of, like the Green Hill Zone port, or Wood Zone. So when the Simon Wai prototype showed up, everyone was out of their minds nuts because we already knew what we were searching for. Like, it was seriously underground stuff at the time. I didn't even know you could dump carts back then, that was all so. Then, like a couple of weeks after that dude showed his cart online, boom, it was dumped. It was nuts because all of the sudden, some dude had a cart with all the levels and screenshots we had been documenting, and emulation was basically brand new, having really only taken off in late 1997. I remember when the Simon Wai prototype showed up, I had already been a member of the scene for several years. Before any prototypes were unearthed, we all knew what we were looking for.
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