The Supreme Topic of 'Other' Knowledge.

Forgive me if this is the wrong thread/sub forum, I wanted to share these and wasn't sure where to put them.

A couple years back I had a customer who saw some Sega Genesis stuff in my shop and told me he used to work for Sega. The next day he came back and showed me these pics - he's the guy with the mic; the kids in the background are playing Sonic 1. Nothing particularly prototypey here this was just part of the Genesis Challenge Mall tour thing. I forgot the guy's name but I believe he worked in marketing or something and I didn't find his name in doing some searching back then. Had his permission to post these and then completely forgot to do it lol.

https://imgur.com/a/9k3a3Gh

Edit: it was Dave Sennett. Remembered when scrolling through my old receipt list because it reminded me of Chris Senn.

 

I had a random thought while listening to Deeper (Death Chamber) from the Sonic Adventure 2 OST.

Is the conversation between Knuckles and Sonic in the song canonical?

Would this not mean Sonic said "damn" before StH05 made such a big deal out of it?

 

Those lyrics are not in the game proper, but are in the OST releases, so I don't think they caused any stirs back in the back.

Yet, for the record, the GCN release was still rated for Mild Lyrics by the ESRB, which to my recollection, was used for lyrics that had swearing in them. If so, then I wonder if an earlier pre-final build was sent to the ESRB with the offending lyric in it...?

 

Wild Canyon's song "Kick the Rock!" has the word "sexy" in it... could that earn a "Mild Lyrics" tag? I mean... that's one pretty mild lyric.

 

And people still think these games are for kids!

 

Maria -> Shot
Gerald -> Executed
Rouge -> Sexy
Knuckles -> Damn right

Sonic Adventure 2 rules

 

Don't forget Eggman holding a gun to Amy's head and Eggman committing terrorism

 

"SHE WILL DIE! ! !"

 

And Sonic apparently inspiring terrorist groups from all around the world after he broke out of prison...

 

fucking bars



For years I thought the "conversation" verse was some goof shit docfuture came up with, but then one day I stumble upon the real version that has it and I nearly cry from laughing. It's so ridiculous lmao

I was under the impression the original DC version of the game had it and only ever playing Battle was the reason I didn't know about it for so long. Is that the case or is it really only the OST that has it?

 

OST only

 

I recently bought a couple of books, セガ・ゲームの王国 and セガvs.任天堂, since the west rarely has any information from the Japanese perspective. Both books are interesting because they are not recent retrospectives, but books on sale at the height of the 16-bit era (Game no Ōkoku is from 1993, Sega vs Nintendo is from 1992).

I started reading through the first one, which starts right away with a discussion of the development of Sonic 1. There are no major revelations, nothing that we don't already know in greater detail. In fact, some of it is downright apocryphal, written as if major design decisions were just just decided one after another in the space of a few meetings. It is probably the author's conceit to summarize months of planning into some simple conversations, but the effect is that things are greatly oversimplified.

Still, it offers a couple of interesting tidbits. Most notably, the story is told from the "perspective" of KANARI Minoru, director of CS1 at the time. To my knowledge, he has largely been absent from the story of Sonic 1's development, with NAKA Yūji usually taking the stage as the creator. This book, however, frames Kanari as the driving force behind the game's creation, under mandate from higher management to defeat Nintendo in the new 16-bit generation after Sega's resounding loss in the 8-bit era. The book also asserts that development planning began in November 1989, nearly a year before most Sonic 1 development stories begin.

There is also a story of Kanari bringing home the first prototype of the game for his 6 year old daughter Masumi to try. She exclaimed that Sonic the character was cute, but he saw her having difficulty playing, dying too easily to the enemies. This led to the decision to lower the difficulty and, eventually, add the concept of rings as a protective element.

There is a brief mention of soliciting the opinions of all 1,500 employees for ideas, but it is largely glossed over.

Anyway, I have done an OCR scan of the first two sections of the first chapter, which covers the Sonic 1 development. You can find it here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YH9P2O2eoJEAIZQDM7SPSenPoxrRSSvE0LjFGhFTxZA/edit?usp=sharing

I did use machine translation because it's simply the fastest option, so some text is a bit stilted. I did it paragraph by paragraph, however, and manually translated anything which was overly strange or incorrect.

 

I believe @Gryson has pointed out the first one being a fantastic source a lot on here over the years. I "acquired" the updated 1996 edition of it with more interviews through a generous donation some time ago, and having read through a loose machine translation it is quite something. There's wider, detailed stuff in there about how Hayao Nakayama was persuaded to join Sega, him being involved with game development on things like Monaco GP from the off, his vision for the future with the Amusement Theme Park concept and networked arcade cabinets etc.

AFAIK the story with these is that Eiji Oshita first ran the material and interviews they'd originally done for their 1993 book as part of a serialised column in the Hochi Shimbun. Some of it was apparently lifted by the second book you mention, which pre-empted it by publishing slightly earlier in late 1992. Also scans of it were quietly uploaded in full a while back, alongside a similar effort that was published later - but as I understand it Oshita's book is the main source of it all, and most Japanese books on this topic use it in some way.

 

What's this?

From: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/2038-next-y2k-bug-legacy-time-overflow-issues-john-o-shea-948pf/

First time I hear of this. I don't think it's documented on the wiki.

 

It looks like AI slop content to me. The problem with playing Sonic for 7 hours is that you can't spend more than 10 minutes in a level lmao.

 

Yeah, that's a load of crap lmao. There do exist a few integer overflow/underflow bugs, but they aren't related to any timers. It's pretty much impossible for the stage timer to go past 9:59, too, because the code that updates it checks its values every frame in which it's active:



The "blo" instructions mean that the branch is taken if the destination value is less than the source value, unsigned (meaning no negative numbers, bytes are treated as 0-255 instead of -128-127). The minute value is forced to stay at 9 if it tries to count past it.

 

Thanks for clearing that up. Disregard then.

 

The NiGHTS cameo in Sonic Shuffle has already been documented on some pages on the wiki such as those for Lumina Flowlight and NiGHTS themselves, but it is technically hidden content as it's a time-based secret, so considering it's Christmas Eve I figured I can get the NiGHTS cameo covered on the game's hidden content page.

And then this is where I noticed some oddities with it:



At first I used the US version of the game to take the above screenshot, and I was confused as to why NiGHTS didn't replace Lumina's portraits as well considering it was something I remembered happening from playing the game on my Dreamcast, so I quickly hunted down a GDI of the EU version and popped it into Redream, and look at that:



Seems like the portrait change only happens in the EU version for some reason, which I presume is due to the EU version being built later on. Very interesting. I'll definitely need to make a comparisons sub-page for this.

Also, it seems this cameo does not activate on newly-created save files. I'm going to assume you need to have some progress on the game for it to happen, perhaps by beating the Story mode?

I would also check to see if the portrait change also happens in the Japanese version, but it can't use US/EU save files and it doesn't seem like premade save files for the Japanese version exist anywhere on the internet, not even on the VMU Explorer disc. I guess I'll have to put a placeholder image for that version on the comparisons page.

 

If you wanted to read about the making of Sonic Generations but didn't catch the magazine, the article went up on GamesRadar today.

 

I'm just watching the newest episode of Dexter...

When suddenly the Game Gear version of Sonic 1 shows up!

And it's... a really awesome cameo!

Actual hardware.
Actual copy of the game.
The Actual game music + sound effects.
Even the screen is hard to see, no green screen/composite trickery.

Edit: It's Sonic 2. Blame my migraine.