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

Oh nice, so my memory was correct. No need to play more Brain Training then. :specialed:

 

Aside from the obvious derping, don't we have proof that several of Sonic Team worked on Crackers? I recall a story of a guy who mentioned it to one of them, and ended up showing him on his PSP?

 

That was Jun Senoue. He didn't work on the title, but had played a physical copy of it back in the 90's (and was therefore familiar with the game).

 

Edit: Whoops, this topic had more pages than I thought. I'm on mobile and it wasn't easy to see before I made this post. Sorry if it's redundant.

To clarify, there's no "l" sound in the Japanese language. Every word, even foreign words, are made up from kana characters which make up every sound in the language, none of which have a "L" sound to them. To compensate for the missing sounds, Ls are substituted for Rs, since they're somewhat close. Pretty much every borrowed or assumed word in the Japanese language has to be assembled using these set sounds that the Japanese language offers, so it's not really that weird when you understand the limitations of the way words within the language are constructed. And hence why Ls 'sound like’ Rs to Japanese speakers.

As I'm sure most are aware, "Sonic" in Japanese is ???? (Sonikku), "Tails" is ???? (Teiruzu, which shows the substitution of L and R), "Amy" would be ??? (Emi, not Ami as you would expect, as the "a" sound in Japanese is closer the a in "apple" (ah), rather than the a in Amy (ay) making Ami be pronounced "ah-me" not "ay-me").

However this then leads to a lot of confusion when translating foreign words out of Japanese again. Clackers would be a good example since in Japanese that would transliterate to ?????? (Kurakkazu), which could very easily be translated back to English as either 'Crackers' or 'Clackers' even for native English speakers who know Japanese it can be difficult. In this case, I think it's simply that whoever made the translation didn't know the English word had a L in it. The misspelling of "Stadium" in the ROM header perhaps shows those working on naming didn't have the strongest possible grasp on the English language in the first place.

Other examples would be ???? which could be "Brad" or "Blood" or ??? which could be "Link" or "Rink" (as in ice hockey). It comes down to context in a lot of cases, titles for games and books are usually devoid of essential context.

As to why the Japanese love using these transliterated words, that's a whole different topic that would take far more words than I've already put into this overly long post (which I'm sure is old news to many already), but let's just say that it's not unusual for Japanese developers to do this, even for an internal demo only going to be seen by other Japanese speakers.

 

Fuck I've thought "Yeah it was probably Clackers" for years because "Sonic Crackers" is an odd name that doesn't appear to line up with anything (you'd think a prototype would be named something relevant like Sonic Rubberband) and the fact that the ROM header "Sonic Studium" looks like a mistranslation, and now I feel dumb for never bringing it up. I just tend to assume you ladies and lords are 10 steps ahead of me :specialed:

Shame it was all an elaborate hoax by the Germans. :v:

 

So it was meant to be Sonic Clackers after all.

Does that make it the biggest Sonic "discovery" of the year so far?

 

This isnt a discovery, this is a theory.

 

I got you covered!
http://ge.tt/5dqi76j2

 

Besides the smoking gun exactly, what else do we need? Mr Burns to admit it?

 

I don't see why this would be an April Fool's joke, anyway. There's really nothing funny about it at all.

 

I think everybody pretty much debunked the whole "This is just a joke / hoax." theory at this point. There's just too much evidence that says that this was a real prototype game. Even if this whole joke theory was true, what would be the point of putting in all of that work and effort to make a fake prototype just for a laugh? I don't understand the logic there.

 

We've had a lot of nitpicking in this community, but I think this is the first "we faked the moon landing-esque" event I've seen.

Truly a landmark event in Retro history.

But yeah, considering where the fangame and Sonic hacking scene were in the mid-90's, I have no doubt it's real.

And Clackers, man. It was in front of us the whole time.

 

I'm putting that in my sig. It just sounds so cool. Thank you.