Holy hell HOLY. HELL. i can't believe you guys finally found it, after soo long it's incredible how far we've come. I'm soo proud of all of you who put in the decades of effort. Congratulations and let's get to work! I can't wait for all the discoverys.
seeing that "standard" sega logo with the cycling palette before the title screen felt, like, surreal you guys are too cool... thanks for all your hard work
Looks like a Special Stage block but it's not in the final afaik. EDIT: Matches the design of other unused Special Stage blocks.
Boss pieces. Don't recognize that spring. (may not be arranged correctly) $60864 Not sure if these are used or not, don't look familiar to me: $2656E $26BF6 That's all the art that I don't recognize, but there could be stuff I missed.
Saw the news earlier today, this is huge. MAJOR thank you to the crew at Hidden Palace for this release!! Between the Nick Arcade Sonic 2 Proto, the Sonic 3 Proto with Sonic 2 sprites, and now this... we have all of the major "holy grail" prototypes that we had all written off as never coming out. This is... this is big. I missed the stream earlier, but I'm watching the saved replay now to check the differences and I'll be loading the game up in my living room later to see what the gameplay's like for myself. This is a great way to end 2020/start 2021!
Yeah, that spring definitely isn't in the final. It looks like it might have been the original attachment for the Star Light Zone boss - the big chute that drops spike balls isn't here.
Holy fuck. I saw this on Google. Hadn't been on here for about a day, but I saw something about a prototype. Unbelievable. 2020 ended with a bang.
Funny, I just was thinking of how this whole situation reminded me of that very thread. Both things were published on December 31th. Even though the original was just a prank hoax, I had some serious deja vu there It's mindblowing to think that we're discussing a real Sonic 1 proto release exactly 17 years later, with some of the oldbies from that time still around. Even more ironic, the scener behind that very hoax is still here and digging through the real proto right now
Y’know, I’m actually wondering about the chunk size here - is it 256x256 like the final? As-is have to remind myself that Sonic 1 works in 256x256 chunks when I see what feels like oddly placed 128x128 chunks.
There’s a bit more story about how this all came to be in the next issue of Retro Gamer - it’s not incredibly dramatic, but I was able to interview Buckaroo and drx before Christmas so the story will be in issue 216 (PS2 on the cover). Genuinely couldn’t believe it when Buckaroo’s email showed up in my inbox - I was expecting to have to tell him he’d been taken in by a clever hoax. By the time I’d watched some very thorough gameplay, I was convinced. I got in touch with drx about it all and thankfully, he was already in contact with Buckaroo - as soon as I knew that, my mind was at ease. That was all about a month ago, and on the day I found out, I was literally reading Gerbilsoft posting in Discord about how we’d never find a Sonic 1 proto - something I’d also believed until literally hours earlier. I’m so pleased that I got to finish off hell year with you guys, watching you lose your collective shit over a holy grail find.
We're seeing Sonic doing the celebration animation that is not Sonic 1 Beta Remake or any ROM hack. Do you know how big it is? LZ background is beautiful by the way, I really liked it more than the final version.
drx, ehw, buckaroo, TCRF, Hidden Palace, with this dreams come true (heh). With how many versions of the first second games we have now after all of this time and these versions of one and three, it's just what we all dreamed of years ago. Plus what we have of X-Treme at this point. Now I actually have hope we may stumble across the Tokyo Toy Show tech demo yet after all. It's our last holy grail outside of something obscure coming out of left field.
