A 2005 Q1 report buried in individual IR news sections (and thus, not shown in certain presentation categories) cites Sonic Heroes' sales at 1.83M at the time of its release (meaning the game sold 410K during that quarter). Since this is three months after Sega's 2004 FY report, this further bumps up the game's cumulative sales tally. In retrospect, seems Heroes really made waves as Sonic's first multiplatform entry for the series, cumulative sales are well over 3.5M. There were other quarterly reports in the IR news sections, but they don't show anything about sales of past Sonic games, sadly. Would add this to Heroes' page, but the CAPTCHA required to complete article updates that include new hyperlinks isn't working as of the moment (on my end), unfortunately.
Cool and interesting stats Yeow. Yeah from what I remember Heroes was extremely successful. It was prolific as a major Sonic title back then for years. Personally I found the game middling and a step below Sonic Adventure 2 despite some awesome stages and ideas like Bingo Highway. Put in something like 120 hours in to SA2 (gotta love the Chao Garden) but only played through Heroes once. It'd be interesting to see if Sega re-visit it in the future especially in regards to that (completely fake) rumour of a Sonic Heroes remake. I mean, those numbers pretty much make it the best-selling 3D Sonic title ever correct?
I didn't loathe Sonic Heroes but I definitely remember a feeling of predominant disappointment. Of the Modern 3D games, it has undoubtedly the most dull gameplay. I was never a big fan of Sonic Adventure 2 in general, even at release, but I would play that any day over Heroes.
Yeah I was profoundly disappointed with it too. Conceptually it initially sounded like a generational leap for Sonic. Like, the idea of controlling the three characters and interchanging them is brilliant - but the execution is just fucked. The primary gameplay mechanic of controlling/switching them just isn't that fun and no way near the level of joy of controlling Sonic in SA2 or even SA1. It had some bright ideas but the end product was just disappointing due to that not fun gameplay loop that could have and should have been executed much better. So you're left with something depressingly mediocre when it should have been brilliant. Reminds me of a certain post-apocalyptic recent Sonic game that via its initial concept art seemed fun and exciting too that also ended up disappointing. I'm noticing a trend here. :v:
A few steps ahead of you both: Category:Investor relations documents https://segaretro.org/File:IR_EN_2004-08-05.pdf That being said it probably only goes up to 2015 since I haven't touched this stuff since.
Now your face can be hard as nails and it won't be hard to tell. p.s. all officially licensed Sonic merchandise should be covered on the Sonic Retro wiki. All of it. Ever.
Michael Jackson sent Sega a demo tape for Sonic 3 music claims Naoto Oshima. Probably not new thread worthy given it's not substantial enough but still super interesting. Michael Jackson has been covered to the ends of the earth but as far as I know this is a new revelation? Would love to hear that demo tape.
Quick question - has the version of Sonic the Hedgehog included as a 'built-in' game on some releases of the Master System II ever been dumped? From memory, it's slightly different to the cartridge version as it lacks the singing Sonic graphics during the end credits. I remember my brother and I completed it several times and never saw the singing Sonic graphics - since he had a friend with a Mk I Master System and the cartridge version of the game, my brother commented on the difference even at the time! It's always stuck in my head as I never saw them for myself until replaying the game on emulators years later.
This has been out for months, though, and I'd expect it's on its way out. My question: could someone point to a source that confirms that Genocide/Cyber City Zone became Metropolis Zone - Act 3?
That's interesting. I guess it was meant to save space? I wonder if there are any other differences. I know Alex Kidd had hamburgers instead of rice balls in the built-in version, but that's just a localization thing.
The Sonic The Hedgehog version that came built-in the Master System II console lacks credits. Because ROM chips were very expensive at the time, the credits were dropped to make room on the small ROM chip for the necessary BIOS routines for the console. By doing this, Sega avoided having to buy bigger and more expensive ROM chips for the console. http://www.mobygames.com/game/sega-master-system/sonic-the-hedgehog__
Oh, so it lacked credits entirely, then? That's the longest music track in the game in addition to the singing Sonic graphics mentioned earlier. That makes sense. Now I wonder if they were aware of Marble Zone's music buried in the data, even if removing that alone might not have been enough. Thanks for the interesting tidbits. I love that I'm still learning new things about this game.
This is probably old news to most of you, but I've only just found out that the file name for Wocky (the monkey) in Sonic 2 is "Beaver". So it seems that at one point Sonic 2 was going to have a beaver instead of a monkey. Are there any clues in any of the prototypes as to when the switch from beaver to monkey happened? (And out of curiosity, does anyone know the file names for the Sonic CD animals? Or the red bird in Spinball?)
What file name? If you mean the disassembly, I hate to burst your bubble, but those names are entirely made up by the people disassembling the ROM, and have no correlation to the original source code.
Ah! That makes more sense then! I was getting my wires crossed and conflated some info with source code from a Sonic 2 prototype, which is completely unrelated but did have labels for Sonic 1's animals. Just wondering if we have anything to go on for CD's unknown animals? There was an old thread discussing Sonic CD's badnik labels, but most of the pastebin posts have expired. The Stardust Speedway one has "spr_flicky1", "spr_flicky2", "spr_ricky1" (and 2, 3, 4). I'm guessing Ricky has four due to the extra sprites of getting stepped on by Metal Sonic. It's all a bit odd becuase Flicky/Ricky aren't in Stardust Speedway, they're in Palmtree Panic and Quartz Quadrant. The Collision Chaos one has a label that is simply "pocky" (and Pocky actually is in that stage).
Sonic was almost human according to Naoto Ohshima. "The main character was a human boy" http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2018/02/oh_boy_sonic_the_hedgehog_was_almost_human
