Jon Burton, the founder of Traveller's Tales and programmer on Sonic R, found his earliest known prototype for Sonic R on an old hard drive. He made a video of him playing it using an emulator: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCvYTOxWcj4 Link in case Youtube embed doesn't work. He's been uploading videos of prototypes of other Traveller's Tales games as well.
This is certainly interesting. It's not all that different to the final game - nothing is unrecognisable. He says that one of the buildings in Resort Island has an Ichthus on it. Has anyone ever noticed this? I'm curious to see it.
Sonic R actually started life as a non-Sonic racing game. I wonder if any prototypes of that still exist (It might not have even got to the prototype stage). From memory, I think it's in the village section.
Hot damn this makes me nostalgic. Gotta play some Sonic R, and maybe some other games from that era. It's a huge shame. Give this game some polish on the physics and the engine could have been used for a proper 3D Sonic game on Saturn. Shouldda happened what with Xtreme being the kerfuffle it was.
I'm still yet to play Sonic R! Traveller's Tales artstyle put me off at the time, I remember buying Wipeout on the Saturn instead. Will get round to trying it out at some point
That certainly flew over my head as a kid. I read recently that there's a lot of Christian references in TT games but I never considered Sonic R. It's wonderful to see this though. The question is, will he ever er, "release" it? :v:
Oh wow! I love seeing old prototypes of games so this is really neat. Never expected anything like this to ever show up. The broken loop has got to be the funniest part. Thanks for sharing this!
This was written about once - I can't remember if it was in an online interview or magazine, but I noticed it as a youngling. I found Sonic R a bit cryptic as a lad - I didn't realise you had to finish first to collect chaos emeralds, so you start over-analysing textures like this for clues. I had a much higher opinion of game designers (if not humans in general) back then.
It's mentioned in this Gamasutra interview from 2006. You can sort of see the symbol in the demo video during the split screen comparison part, but only for a split second. I'm no religious person, but it's fun to find out stuff like this lol.
Looks like Sonic R must have been one of those games with a pretty rigid development. They knew exactly what they wanted from the beginning going by how little it differs from the final. I'm betting all the other stages didn't change too drastically, either. He said in one of the comments that the build is time-stamped May 2, 1997, and the retail release was within the same year, so this was a pretty fast project!
I've read in to Traveller's Tales history before and this is how they were in the 90's. His company has had ups and downs with friends backstabbing and I believe some even coming back, but he has always been a hard, dedicated worker that pulled off impressive feats in short amounts of time. And NOW he's uploading high quality footage of unseen stuff that he worked on!? What a great dude.
On the one hand, damn, that's a hell of a turnaround time. On the other, no wonder there are only 5 tracks if that's how long they worked on it!
Jon is trying to court Richard Jacques in to passing along potentially early temporary vocal recordings, of which may be the contents of a DAT tape labeled "Sonic TT"
Back in those days, did Saturn racing games have many tracks? Sega Rally only had 3 plus one bonus stage. Also I think Sonic Team did all the level design for Sonic R, so that probably helped things. Fun fact: Back in 2006, Jacques did a concert where he said that Sonic R was originally called Sonic TT.
Was it just called Sonic TT as a placeholder though? I mean, Sonic TT could easily stand for Sonic travelers tales. And wow, 7 months? No wonder there was so little content and some trash AI.
