Whoa, this one crept up on me. I'd sort of hoped I'd be peddling a new Sonic 3 Complete for the anniversary, but that's worked out even less well than any of my previous attempts to work to a date.
Instead I will celebrate with some boring reminiscence.
I was a Nintendo guy at the start of 1994. I'd played a bunch of platformy stuff on my cousin's SNES during Easter and summer holidays in London, enough to bully my parents into getting me one of my own one Christmas. But when I turned up for Easter '94, the SNES was gone, and in its place a Mega Drive with a newly purchased Sonic 3.
I didn't really want to like Sonic. You know how it was - you had to pick your side and stick to it, especially if you weren't loaded enough to just buy everything. But there's something about Sonic 3 in particular that ended up being irresistable. Part of it is surely that it was my first Sonic, but even so, it has this particular style in the design of the levels, players, badniks, typography, music. Bugs though there may have been, it was a very slick presentation - it felt modern, and sort of mature and down to earth in a way that video games - platformers especially - generally weren't. I can remember leaving the competition menu or save screen playing its tunes in the background for hours. Data Select is best for sunny days, Competition for watching heavy rain out of the window. (This probably means I was among the first people to hear the Data Select music glitch, in the grand scheme of things).
The rough edges were a part of the charm in a way. The stories I like best tend to give the impression there's more to the world than you're able to see, and those unreachable bits of Knuckles' routes, and whole locked levels on the level select, and their extra music, left you to wonder. (Finally seeing a "Sandopolis Zone" title card on a shop machine playing the S&K demos was quite a revelation from that point of view). Debug mode and the slightly wonky level select let you start to figure out how things tick, too; the debug numbers and title card confusion giving some hint that the joined-together acts weren't as seamless inside as they looked in a normal playthrough, for instance. And the readily accessible surfboard stuff, and the "Eiosian" spheres (because why does anybody call anything anything, anyway?) All these little fragments that made you wonder.
Sonic & Knuckles and Sonic 3 & Knuckles were fantastic, and it was obviously brilliant to have another half to the game, and to find out what all those locked off parts were for, but for me it never quite had the same impact as the original Sonic 3 - the few music and presentation changes were just a slight disappointment on the edge of an otherwise superb package. Even back then I used to imagine a more appealing combination of the two, although I didn't really imagine I'd ever be able to try my own hand at making one.
By now, I wouldn't like to count the amount of time I must have poured into that game, both playing it and tweaking it. I should probably just go ahead and marry a Sonic 3 cartridge. A very happy birthday to you, my favourite software.
GeneHF 
12
Candescence 
