Hey remember unreleased game SegaSonic Bros.?? Well this isn't it. Or is it? https://picclick.com/SEGA-BANDAI-MAGAZINE-Guide-Fan-Book-Saturn-Mega-304637657135.html Today on "publications I don't understand", "Sega Bandai Magazine", circa 1997. Probably part of a series of doujin magazines... but I don't understand the series. "Sonic Bros." (ソニックブラザーズ) According to that paragraph, the story is the same as SegaSonic Bros., i.e. it was put out on location test and presumably failed but the screenshot... doesn't match our dump. It's blurry and monochrome and generally horrible but a) there's no background b) there's more Sonic heads c) there are holes in the play area, i.e. it's Tetris-style no gravity as opposed to Puyo Puyo-style combos. I don't know if it's a legitimate screenshot or something made up, but it could be a different version of the game, and cruicially if the 1997 date is correct, suggests somebody non-Sega knew about it 20 years before we did. On the other side of the page is "Sonic & Madonna" which we think is from a Mega-CD demo from 1991. There may be more about it, there may not be. We need scans.
Agh the OCR let me down. That's a shot of Puzzle Construction for the Teradrive, which just so happens to have a very similar pre-loaded blue/red/yellow Sonic puzzle game. So interesting in the sense that I didn't know that was a thing, but perhaps I should have. Doh. I've been caught out by mysterious Teradrive software before - has anyone managed to emulate the thing yet?
That's one of Vafiyon (or however you romanize his name)'s doujinshi. He was probably the biggest Mega Drive doujinshi distributor back in the day. He's on Twitter and has a wealth of knowledge about Sega. He's the one who interviewed Ohshima and Yamaguchi a few years back in that long interview that I've translated parts of here. There are no doubt a lot of errors in his old publications, but it's impressive what he was able to uncover back then. Edit: I assume the Sonic and Madonna thing is from a TeraDrive demo. He had mentioned it a number of times and I think even has a video of it on YouTube.
That thing, and yes you're right it's a Mega Drive/Teradrive demo, not a Mega-CD one. I'm starting to think I shouldn't make topics when I'm hungry. From what I recall, that demo was shown at the 1990 Tokyo Toy Show (the same event Sonic was first shown), but there seems to be conflicting reports about what it was doing there. Instinct is to assume it's pushing real time rotation and scaling as a response to the Super Famicom, but I'm not sure if that's to say "the Mega Drive can do this too!" or as part of a demo reel for the Teradrive, which was Sega's big thing in Japan for about 9 months (and wasn't yet on sale). I mean arguably it doesn't matter - half of the the Teradrive is a Mega Drive, the code should run the same on both systems. In fact... maybe it was running on both systems at the event - nobody knows!
As Black Squirrel said, this screenshot is from Puzzle Collection for the Teradrive, specifically one of the default sample games "GAME2". Armadylo has a video on his YouTube channel showing off gameplay footage recorded from real hardware. Footage begins at 1:44. It's pretty much a clone of Columns, except you have to line 4 tiles in a row, and you cannot clear them diagonally. It's also 2-player only. Edit: After watching the video and looking over the magazine's screenshot, it's looks like the screenshot might be an earlier version of the game as the HUD looks different. You can edit HUD positions and other things in Puzzle Construction easily but I've asked Armadylo and he didn't mess around with any default settings from the rip of the disk provided online.
Dr. Mario. Puzzle Construction launched with the Teradrive on 31st May 1991, which means this is technically the first official Sonic the Hedgehog game released to the public. Unless Sonic Eraser got there first. We don't have a precise date on that one.
