Not sure if anyone on here has noticed or not, but back around Christmas time, someone in Japan appears to have quietly uploaded footage of Sonic Kart 3DX, a lost Sonic Cafe game that to my knowledge, there was never previously anything for aside from a couple of screenshots. I haven't personally reached out to this individual to inquire about a potential file download. That's probably better suited towards someone who is good at getting the source to cough it up. I've been following Sonic Kart 3DX for years and would love to see this one finally move out of the lost media realm. Side note: the soundtrack is surprisingly good in this one. EDIT: I just looked through this individual's YouTube channel and it actually appears that he/she has every single Sonic Cafe game plus a whole bunch of others. The channel has extensive video footage of all of them. No question this individual has the files.
I can't believe how many mobile games there are. Some of them look especially interesting (Sonic Hopping lol)
So I'm guessing a lot of Sonic-related shovelware mobile games were made, then? Was it just another example of SEGA's inability to see a licensee they didn't love? It's definitely got that janky old mobile game quality. Doesn't look too great, typical Kart racer knockoff, but I'd be more fascinated to see the coding. When was Sonic Cafe? Like, early/mid 2000s?
From the uploader's YouTube page description: Since there is not much information left on the internet for feature phone games, I am posting a play video with the intention of keeping it as a record and material. Since it is not for profit, I have no intention of receiving any financial relations such as advertising revenue. Since I want to keep it as it is, I basically do not edit the live commentary, subtitles, etc. When a deletion request comes from the manufacturer, it will be deleted immediately. The video will be deleted even if the G-MODE archives developed on Nintendo Switch or Steam or the manufacturer voluntarily port it to a PC, game console, etc. Games that are difficult to clear due to genres that you are not good at or the difficulty level may be videos in the early stages or halfway. I'm playing with the actual device, not the emulator. I have a few friends who live in Tokyo that I've already reached out to. Going to see if they can help me contact this individual. While I have my doubts, I figure it's at least worth inquiring to see if maybe this individual will agree to either give or sell a copy of these games. I can't imagine there being many people in Japan who have these, so there may never be another chance to obtain them.
Finally, something interesting! This is an awesome find! Hopefully we can get our hands on the games themselves, I'd love to see what goodies are buried within.
There's no Good Friend Chao video. Any chance someone could ask if this person has that on hand please?
The Sonic Cafe games were actually made by Sonic Team themselves. Yuji Naka said that he had worked on the code for some of them himself. Some even had full story modes. It’s weird: For the Java phones, Sonic Team were super active. Then when Smart Phones came they lost interest even though Smart Phones were a much more lucrative market. In fact some of the smart phone games that were viral hits actual used ideas that Sonic Cafe had pioneered years earlier. Sega did the work and then left the money on the table.
Sonic Cafe Mega Collection please. Haha. Seriously these should be available somewhere. Maybe as unlockables in another game. The Sonic stuff I mean. I already knew about the service but seeing the videos are cool. I didn’t go through all of them just a handful of the Sonic games. Some were really well done.
That's so fascinating. Just one more weird little tech tangent for Sega and Sonic Team. I wonder if the halting was just a boneheaded executive decision, or if Sonic Team just simply didn't see the marketable potential and were more just focused on making the games themselves. Or could it have been a case of the Sonic games themselves not being too popular in Japan (anecdotally, that's the case), and thus in a sea of burgeoning Japanese phone game experimentation, they simply got lost in a shuffle, with the ideas never grounding themselves except in the heads of other developers?
Sonic Team as a whole seem to be much less active nowadays. They used to put out games left and right in the noughties, but the past decade? Unless I'm missing something, all we got from them was a few Sonic and Puyo Puyo games.
To be fair, I can't imagine that it's a particularly enjoyable production experience for them. They're generally forced to rush out mediocre games, which inevitably get bad reviews due to the rush, which leads to less budget being given to future productions, and it just continues in this downward spiral of diminishing returns, by people who are probably so burnt out by the cycle that there's no drive to even push forward and excel. That's why it takes fans with passion to produce quality content. They aren't burnt out by a godawful corporate system that doesn't encourage creativity. Back in the noughties, it probably felt like this brave new world full of exciting possibilities, hence all this time and energy going into new experimental projects.
I think it's important to keep in mind that the Sonic Team of today (assuming they still exist, I keep hearing things about the American Sonic Pillar taking over) is vastly different from the Sonic Team of the 2000s or even more so the 1990s. On topic though, hopefully something can be worked out with this YouTuber. It's already very promising that they wanted to upload videos on these games for the sake of preservation.
I first caught wind of these when they were originally uploaded in December - from convos around that time I remember it being said that the uploader (who only uploaded these because of their unusual phone model with a HDMI port) doesn't want to co-operate with other people, and that i-Mode shuts down in 2026 - this may well be a dead end Apparently dumping these games is doable, as there's at least 600 uninteresting free ones on the Internet Archive, but then I've also heard contrary things from other people. Basically if there isn't a concerted effort to save this stuff, it will just fade away within a few years; at least we've got footage for some of them now though.
The best old J2ME game I'd like to see dumped is the original Sonic Jump, which indeed did predate Doodle Jump by years. I thought it was a lot of fun and even better than the IOS/Android version in some ways. Edit: This one might actually be dumped already. Still, I'd of course like to see the Sonic Cafe games preserved. I was jealous of them during the pre-smartphone days.
Wouldn’t Sega have the games/files themselves already? It’s still up to them if they want to make them available but I wouldn’t think they’re gone.
Well this service was from the 2000s and the games were the final releases. Probably not on their top shelf but I’d guess they have them. Especially the Sonic ones. Did they really lose the Genesis Prototypes or is that what’s believed to have happened since others dug them up? I honestly don’t know. I never kept up with the prototype stuff.