Sonic Spinball prototype origins?

Ran into this on ebay:


https://picclick.com/1993-SEGA-Contest-Vintage-Print-Ad-Poster-Sonic-the-175354409461.html
Fun! Prizes! Contests! Giveaways!

This is EGM and Hero Illustrated Super Tour '93. Sendai Publishing did a few of these in the mid-90s, but only the 1993 one has Sega stuff in it. It occurred during August, September and October of that year.



Obviously only EGM covered this event, and according to them, everything was awesome, because obviously. Also look, it's Plok.


Sega brought along Sonic Spinball, Eternal Champions and Jurassic Park - there are two Sega kiosks as the back of this photo, and presumably all three games were playable. But "be the first" is an interesting line - Jurassic Park shipped at the beginning of August, and both it and Eternal Champions were playabable at Summer CES in June. Sonic Spinball though? That was only a video at SCES. So August 1993 might genuinely be the first time the general public could play the game.

You know what else has an August date?

Sonic the Hedgehog Spinball (Mega Drive prototype; 1993-08)

That prototype of ours - the one that's been sitting around for decades, but whose origins are unknown. The build's too late for Summer CES, but the final iterations are dated mid-September. If this build was compiled before the 13th August, it could have gone on tour, being paraded around US shopping malls for a few months. It's very easy for a cartridge to go missing when you're moving to a new public venue every week, and as the ROM was supposedly dumped in 1993 (before the final game made it to shelves?) the dates line up.

However, as this is something only EGM cared about, there isn't a massive amount of coverage out there - they're certainly not going to mention cartridges going missing. Can we confirm or deny our Sonic Spinball proto was from here?

 

Another maybe notable thing: our prototype wasn't covered by the gaming press (or at least, it hasn't been seen in any of the scans we have). There's SCES coverage, and a few official screenshots that Sega presumably distributed around the same time, but the larger previews came after mid-September, and seem to show final (or at least, near-as-makes-no-difference final) builds.

There is one place you can see it though: Sega Video Magazine (1993-12). At least I think it's the same build - I don't know this prototype as well as I thought I did and our wiki coverage is... incomplete.

 

or "Sonic's Pinball" as Andy Crane calls it - sadly this looks like the final game, unless there was a preview at some point.


Sonic rowing across to get the final emerald in Toxic Caves is almost notable... because it's the only way to get it in the prototype. It's also something I didn't know about until today.

 

Hidden Palace is claiming this prototype was released on 6 October 1993 by the group PREMIERE. It would be nice if someone could find an old BBS log or something.


"WINSTON"

Did you know

there's an intro buried in the ROM. I don't know if that means it was modified since its original leak, or if it was turned off by default. Either way, if for whatever reason this build is seen in the wild again, it could do with a redump.


By the way, if you needed more proof for some reason that this game was written in C, all of the messages are in stored in plain text (and yes that does mean there are bonus level messages which you can't see)

Code (Text):

1. SORRY, YOU NEED %d MORE EMERALD%s...

C-style string formatting. %d is an integer, %s is a string (in this case, whether to add "S" for plurals).

 

How confident are we saying the "alt music" version of Spinball was a prototype? Just because I'll sort out the wikis if it genuinely is one - I don't feel qualified to say either way.

Nobody's come forward with a real cartridge (and it's not an uncommon game - there's like, 800 (US) copies on ebay right now), and it's more than just the music that differs - the level select code doesn't work, for example. "Unfinished" might not be the correct word, but the other US ROM is clearly "more finished", yet isn't marked as a revision like other games usually were.

(though there are legitimate commercial games in the Mega Drive library that don't append -01 or -02 or whatever to software revisions, so it not being marked as one doesn't necessarily mean it isn't one, especially if the fix was super quick and skipped quality control)

Though I'll debunk my 2019 self - I think it's very unlikely this was a rental version.



Anyway another EGM thing regarding the "August" version. They had a build eerily similar to ours:


https://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File:EGM_US_051.pdf&page=104
Rexxon has the same palette error as our ROM, but also... they made a map. How do you make a map in 1993? Lots of screenshots. How do you get the off-screen bits? The free movement mode, which our prototype has turned on by default (p.s. has anyone found it in the final game - it would be really handy).

You can tell EGM were cheating because Sonic can be seen standing in mid-air, but he's also in areas that are impossible to get to in normal play without collecting some of the rings.

 

Ding - Sonic the Hedgehog Spinball (alternate music prototype). Make it better.

Or indeed any Sonic Spinball page, since apparently lots of stuff was known, but none of it was written down.

 

You'd be amazed how often I make that mistake.