Sonic Crackers is not a Beta, it's a joke

Clackers?! CLACKERS?!?!



Really wish these magic German hackers had set a foot in our community so that we could've seen some quality fan projects a decade sooner- they evidently threw together a fair bit of professional art and animation (without Sega's proprietary digitizer tablets?) in a very short time, all for a laugh.

 

Just to prove the name wasn't completely unexpected:

Crime Crackers, December 1994.

May even have been the reason the name was changed!

 

I've also heard in passing that Crackers was mostly handled by STI, is there anything to corroborate that? It wasn't unusual for those guys to pour months into pitch development. The visual style of those stages (industrial with muted colors) is totally in line with the art we know for sure that Americans were responsible for (Oil Ocean, Metropolis, all of Spinball), and it may also justify the unconventional ASCII title screen and relative lack of coding skill (EDIT: Also explains why they would've been working with Sonic 2 as a base, being the last Sonic they would've had access to).

 

Well that name makes some sense. Judging from the title they crack crimes, like they cracked the case or something. Sonic Crackers though I can't really think of an explanation for that one.

 

http://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File%3AMeanMachinesSega29UK.pdf&page=8

From what we have, it appears that Sega were a little reluctant to show off Chaotix because its control scheme was a little... bold. When it was finally shown in early 1995, most of the work had been done, save for special stages and extra layers of polish (consistent with our prototypes, really).

Not that there's a set time period for when games should be shown off, but Sonic 1 and 2 debuted early and we got a good look at some really really early Saturn titles (of the 5-10% complete, barely playable variety). There wasn't much confidence in Chaotix (and tbh it shows).




I wouldn't want to draw a specific connection to STI but it's fully possible that as 32X console development was American-led, software was mostly US-based too. Virtua Racing Deluxe was an in-house Japanese-led product, but most other things were sent off to external studios or produced stateside. The focus was on the Saturn.



also
http://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?showtopic=9050&st=30&p=205379&#entry205379



and that other 32X Sonic game? My money's on Sonic X-treme.

 

CLACKERS. Holy shit.

Also, didn't Jun Senoue confirm that he played Crackers at SEGA back in the 90s?

Doesn't that entirely kill the possibility of Crackers being a homebrew project?

 

Yeah, that pretty much confirms it then :specialed:

This looks really sarcastic, but it honestly isn't :v:

 

This is a really good read with some background/ origins to Sonic Crackers My link

LOL I just realized there is a topic hosting this article a few spaces down...

 

That is a really good read, I'm learning lots about Crackers today!

 

Nice, gonna dig into this.

Also, in future can we all refer to Chaotix as Clackers now?

It's just too good not to

 

The Sonic Mars script mentions Sonic Stadium... so, what else would it be?

 

Another grand joke by the Germans.

 

Going back to when Sonic Crackers actually appeared online, I would have put money down that not a single person online had the prerequisite knowledge to fake such a prototype. Hell, doing so today would still be a considerable accomplishment, even with all the tools (like annotated disassembles of the sonic engine and the public-resource physics guide) that we have that we didn't have back then. You're talking someone faking a sega genesis sonic prototype during an age when klik n kreate clones were common.

No, I don't.

most of the world uses year-month-day.

 

I was thinking exactly that.

The fact that the artwork is trademark SEGA stylee from that era (although obviously rough round the edges) I don't think the legitimacy is really in question at this point.

Slightly unrelated I am dying for some new/old zone art to turn up, although I doubt there's anything new out there at this point (apart from S1 betaa)

I want a new era of discovery.

 

Assuming you are serious:

I do in fact have a copy. There are a couple dozen of them around because a Sega employee (in the US) made them for profit to be sold in collecting circles (for like $40 a copy iirc), sacrificing other EPROM carts. Anyone could have bought one of those in 1995 and released them on usenet.

I've talked to people who worked on the project. It started on Genesis as a tech demo, then moved to Saturn (I almost found a copy...), then was moved to 32x. Somewhere along the line Sonic and Tails were dropped (if I recall correctly because Sega didn't allow it).

I have more info that I've been meaning to post for many years but I have to find the time.

Edit: found a pic of my crackers cart: http://trash.drx.pl/collection/290208/crackers.jpg Worst photo ever, but it was taken 9 years ago with a pre-iPhone cell phone presumably.

 

Crackers is actually a game that was known as Sonic Stadium, and was referred to in a Sonic Mars document. It's called Sonic Studium in the ROM, though, because of translation stuff (there's no "uh" sound in Japanese so they use ? for both "uh" and"ah")

OP, do some damn research before making threads like this.

 

drx if you do find time, please do. I'm sure we'd all love to hear new info

 

drx, I would really love to hear about Crackers info! Knuckles Chaotix's development has always interested me greatly.

I wonder how the Saturn version looked.

 

So the question is, when is someone going to hack that title screen to display the "actual" name?

 

I never knew there was a Sega Saturn version of Knuckles Chaotix! I would love to learn more about that because I find it extremely interesting. I really wonder how it would have looked and played compared to the 32x version. I really don't buy this theory at all. Everyone has already made really good arguments as to why this is a real and official early prototype / tech demo and some more reasons could be to look at the actual playable stages in Crackers and compare them to the finalized stages in Chaotix. The first stage in Crackers resembles the final stage Techno Tower in Chaotix. The level design is very similar and it plays very similarly too. It has similar gimmicks and even the same music from the Crackers level plays in the stage. You can actually see the evolution and development of the stage from it's Crackers version to it's finalized form. Same goes for the second stage in Crackers, the carnival themed level. It resembles and plays similarly to Speed Slider from Chaotix. You can see the similarities but the finalized form is pretty different still. Another thing too is that Mighty's sprites match up perfectly with Sonic's from Crackers. You can see that Mighty is literally a Sonic clone.