The official Google Play Twitter account has decided to make its own Sonic timeline and it’s uh… People might ask who gave the intern the keys to the account. I’m wondering if this could be AI? I just can’t rationalise how this could be the workings of a real person? Odd but… go off I guess.
It has to be AI, this makes no god damn sense, even from your most out of the loop mom that only vaguely knows what Sonic is would not place Boom Sonic in 1993.
Whoever (or whatever) made the thread probably found that "Sonic Boom" was created in 1993, without realising that it refers to the US Sonic CD theme and not the game sub-series.
A person in a Sonic suit on TV with Ryan Drummond's voice was not on my bingo card today... This clip apparently comes from a recent reupload of an episode of the Rosie O'Donnell show (Season 4, Episode 69 from December 2nd 1999)
Is she confusing the VMU for "game cartridges" or is she just being an average person who doesn't know anything about video games past the NES?
>says free Dreamcast GAME for audience >Sonic is holding a Dreamcast CONSOLE box Nice bait and switch =P
So much of computing history is basically lost. This is the best photo I could find of the Bosch-FGS 4000, a graphical workstation from 1983 most famous for doing the CG in Dire Straits' Money for Nothing music video. Apparently it was astonishing back in the day. Also apparently Bosch made graphical workstations - the more you know. Anyway I was watching this demo video and I spotted something What an odd scene. There's some 3D arches for no reason and a vaguely musical theme. What an odd scene. There's some arches for no reason and a vaguely musical theme. I'm not sure if it means anything, but it's a curious coincidence.
A YouTuber named The Storm did a deep dive into the Wii version of Sonic Unleashed's files and discovered that the game was most likely going to have two daytime acts per continent during development. Most of the second acts are used as missions, but the level files and unused geometry indicate they were intended to be full acts. A real interesting watch. Looks like Sonic Team/Dimps got Arid Sands and Dragon Road done and Rooftop Run and Jungle Joyride partially done, but made little to no progress on Cool Edge and Eggmanland. The assumption is that the developers ran out of time to finish the Act 2s and just chopped up what they did into missions.
So Archie had a single-issue SA2 adaptation near release. I was rereading it today when I noticed some easter eggs amongst the newspaper staff. (Not least among them, "Spaz's Say")
Wait, what? I only found Simon Belmont, Ryu Hayabusa*, and Strider Hiryu! Edit: Ah, derp, the picture underneath*. Shame on me!
I cant put my finger on it but theres something really, really off about that drawing of rouge.. Maybe its the neck? Her entire body is drawn in a really bizarre way
That dude would show up anywhere Spaz could sneak him in. I remember when I got my secondhand Saturn as a kid, it came with Astal and I got really excited because I recognized him from Spaz's covers.
Spaz likes to insert Astal cameos in almost every Archie Sonic issues. Even in his "Sketchbook" section.
Well, what CGI workstations did SEGA use for their early Megadrive games? There must have been some experimentation in the early days, and there was obviously an affinity for the polygonal look even in earlier games. I imagine they invested in new ones as time went on, of which there is probably more documentation and trails of. Sonic 3 is clearly more advanced than Sonic 1, but I wonder if early machines were used to perhaps render simple geometric palm trees, before converting them to simple sprite work. I doubt individual jobbing programmers and artists had top-of-the-line stuff, let alone SEGA, at least on a company-wide basis. But what are the odds that a burgeoning graphics designer in this field had access to some Bosch graphics hardware? No doubt they would have watched the in built demo. Could early Megadrive/CD art have been thus produced on relatively simple, potentially secondhand, and cheaper Bosch stations? The limited texturing ability and simple colours would be ideal for designing 3D graphical shapes with which to use as a basis for further 2D art touch ups. It was still an impressive piece of kit for the time, clearly intended for the main visual medium of television and advertisements, but anyone in the graphics field could see the potential. Heck, it would still be entirely useful today, even with monumentally more advanced hardware. Found a fascinating thread by people who worked on that system and maintained it back it back in the day. https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/bosch-fgs-4000.45327/ Has some fascinating history about it's usage and where the company/systems were based. Apparently it was one of four major CG workstations available, but was the only hardware based one whereas the others were software based and ran on Unix workstations. I'm unsure of differences between Japanese computer setups and Western ones, but could the hardware basis be a factor in why it may have been preferable for usage among many separate computer set ups?
I don't think it's unreasonable to think that when developing a graphics demonstration "video", the developers would look at older graphics demonstration videos (although I don't know where that specific clip came from - the YouTube video I posted combines a bunch of use cases and just credits the advertising agency - maybe it was on TV?). Graphics workstations weren't a thing in video games until the early 1990s because they were far too expensive (and in some cases, cumbersome - we're not talking supercomputer-size, but you'd probably have to dedicate a room to just one machine). The technology became more manageable though - Sega started investing in Silicon Graphics (SGI) hardware in the early 90s, and the software written for those machines is responsible for most pre-rendered CG of the Mega Drive and early Saturn eras. Donkey Kong Country usually gets the credit for spurring on the industry to invest in the technology, but we think Sega were already on top of things (see: Clockwork Knight). There's a whole history of Sega AM3's experiments with pre-rendered CG around 1993/1994 on Sega Retro somewhere. I have briefly looked into 80s graphics workstations - most of them aren't documented very well, if at all. I'm genuinely not sure how widespread such systems were in film (I get the impression that much of it was Industrial Light & Magic inventing things from scratch), but the main customers seems to be advertising agencies, followed by television production companies. I wasted some time looking into ITV schools on Channel 4, and apparently only one ITV franchise had the technology to produce these in-house (Central). That was 1987 - so the biggest commercial television network in the UK maybe had one machine, tops. There'd be more in America, but I think we're talking tens rather than hundreds or thousands.
