Playing Sonic CD Felt Spiteful

I knew 4 people who had Sega CDs IRL, and they all had played sonic CD, but I knew a *ton* of other people who played Sonic CD through their dinky computer. I was a regular who ran a Special Interest Group about Gaming at Hal-PC in Houston, the world's largest PC Users club. People from all over Texas would come by with their PCs on weekends, and I saw so many little kids who had Sonic CD on their absolutely ancient computers around 1999-2001. I saw way more people who had played Sonic CD through the PC port, than I knew who had played Sonic CD on a real Sega CD.

 

It's a hard thing to prove or disprove of how accessible Sonic CD was during that era.

In the US, between 1990-1997 the percentage of households owning computers increased from 15 to 35%. By the year 2000, 51% of households had one.

The issue is finding out how much of that population played the game.

I do remember the Sega PC games stock and promotions. But if I had to guess I don't think a lot of that stock moved looking at how cheap they were selling them (or practically giving them away) for.

This is not even going into other issues that Blue Blood mentioned.

I remember that Jack in the Box promotion and the people there were nice to give me the toys/games stock at the end of it.

But we didn't get a pc, and it was an used one, until 2003 and I was sad that I couldn't play those in it.

And for many parts of the world it wasn't until the late 2000s that a big chunk of their population had access to personal computers.

So in a lot of ways Gems Collections and then the remaster made it more accessible.

 

Enough people had a Mega CD/SEGA CD to make the game popular and sell better than a lot of base Mega Drive games, just sales were low compared with base Sonic game.
Also, by 94/95 the Mega CD base unit price had come down so people could afford the Mega CD by them, just that most people didn't want to bother with the Mega CD at that time as its rep for quality games was pretty poor.

For the PC price was a barrier, but most people I knew who had a top end PC at the time wouldn't lower themselves to play console games and the SEGA PC line was kind of new and would take time to get established too

I think Sonic CD sold well because of the hype, and because it felt like a rather different Sonic game after Sonic 2. So people wanted to check it out, after all the hype, I had a couple of non-gaming friends ask to play my import Night Trap on my Mega CD. Yes, it was mainly to see the 'shower' scene, but the hype made them want to play it, and those were the sort of friends who thought gaming was for nerds/ and it was all about going to the pub and getting girls

 

This is a fascinating account, but I'd like you to understand this reads somewhat like "what do you mean Sonic CD was inaccessible? Everyone at Sonic CD Accessibility Center had access to it!".

Forget about Mega/SEGA CD. For all intents and purposes, it might as well not even have existed -- in Brazil, at least. I grew up in a somewhat privileged environment, but only ever saw Sonic CD once: a friend of mine had the PC port for whatever reason and gave it to me because he knew I loved Sonic. But that was like 2002 already and the rich kids in my school had a Gamecube or a PS2, so Sonic CD was hardly going to impress them -- having a PC at home only became the norm around the mid-2000s, and you sure as hell wouldn't find Sonic CD installed in a lan house PC. Even in Sonic circles, where people would be introduced to Sonic through all kinds of places (from Sonic 3 & Knuckles or Sonic 3D Blast PC ports to the GBA games to Sonic Heroes to SA2:B to Sonic X, all at the same time), playing Sonic CD was sort of a chore. You had to either pirate this second-tier collection for your PS2 that had Sonic CD and these weird-ass spin-offs and 8-bit titles, or emulate it on your PC through a process that resembled buggy witchcraft. It wasn't just something you came across randomly.

So I, for one, can't deny from my experience that Sonic CD had this aura surrounding it, this mystique. Not for a second do I believe that's why people liked it, though. People actually like Sonic CD, and it kinda hurts to hear people would only like it for some terminally online, performative reason. I think the thing is, if you got Sonic CD at any point before 2011, you were more likely to actually spend time with it and learn to speak its language -- which isn't even that foreign and bizarre to begin with. It's not an actively hostile game -- there's a whole school of user-hostile game design, you know, and Sonic CD is very far from it. It's a slightly different classic Sonic game, but a classic Sonic game nevertheless.

 

Having a PC may not have been the norm for a while, but the point is that millions of PC owners got a copy of Sonic CD, and by accounts it was available for cheap for years. That would mean that the game had a far bigger reach than contemporary Sonic games at the time.

Consider also: when did it become the norm to have a game console capable of running Sonic CD at home?

 

The Mega CD had enough users in Europe and the USA to have made sure a lot of people got to play the game before you even look at the PC. It sold a lot better than most Mega Drive games with over a million sales

 

I'm certainly an exception to this. I played CD for the first time in the mid-00's via Gems Collection, and while it was impossible not to stumble into the time travel mechanics here and there I had no idea about the exploration-time travel-exploration gameplay loop that the level design is built for. Consequently, I found the game....alright, but nothing that special. Only after the 2011 version released did I see someone playing it the 'right' way, and suddenly everything clicked and I came to love the game.

 

I had a one-night stand with a girl who had a Mega CD with Sonic CD. This was in 2010. I remember nothing else about her.

Good times.

 

I can't speak to how accessible or not Sonic CD was at the time, but I can say that I got a CD rom for pretty cheap that ran on both my mom and my grandma's old, cheap desktops pretty easily so it wasn't much a mystified artifact for me. I mostly didn't like it very much, but that wasn't because of level design theory. It was because I was 4-5 and the "evil" levels you could stumble into sometimes were "scary". I remember seeing some mystique surrounding it on the net, but that tends to happen for lesser known games. It feels like it's your responsibility to get people to pay attention to it, and if you feel really strongly about it you're going to use strong words to try and convey that, somehow. I don't blame anybody for doing it and I don't think it was performative. It's by far the longest my relationship with a Sonic game has "developed" over time too with me going from hating it to liking it quite a bit, and I think that counts for something. I only have relationships with games that are rich in some quality that's hard to nail down at first blush.

Sonic Gems collection didn't feel like it was long after that either, at least comparatively speaking. It only took about a decade to get a real port vs Unleashed's 20 years.

 

...You mean the PC version, which is the version used for Gems Collection, wasn't a "real" port?

 

Too much is being made about the PC version. Sonic CD was made for the Mega-CD to give users a quality game and help sell the system. Whatever SEGA sold on the PC was just a bonus and no different from the likes of Ecco on SEGA PC

In 1994 I knew a lot of people with a Mega-CD, The main issue was that they didn't have much interest in the unit, after getting one for launch and being disappointed with the early Pal software.
The Price of the Mega CD add-on was coming down all the time in 94 with the Mega CD 2, you could get one for £200 or below if you looked around, more of an issue was that most people who had a Mega CD didn't bother much with it, or those without one never felt the need to buy one, even with the price coming down. By 1995 if you wanted a Mega-CD, it could cost a little £99

Sonic CD and The Mega CD wasn't some mythical system out of reach for everyone. Sonic CD sold very well, it's just when you compare its sales to the base Sonic MegaDrive titles, it looks poor and it never sold the Mega-CD like SEGA hoped it would, a lot like Shenmue on the DC really.

 

I played Sonic CD before 2011 probably via Gems Collection and didn't like it and found the time travelling weird and confusing. When I played the 2011 version on PS3 the game clicked with me and I have loved the game ever since. I have even played the game on my Xperia Play phone. Great times.

 

Not really, when the argument put forward is "nobody played it cuz Mega CD" and there was indeed a PC version. I knew a bunch of people with the game back when; Sonic wasn't on PC prior and yet was a huge cultural phenomenon in the early-mid '90s. This was a fair few friends' first exposure to the franchise. Most loved it, at that.

 

It depends on the timeline. When Sonic CD came out in 1993, console gaming was big, and PC gaming wasn't even close here in the UK and by the time of the Sonic CD on the PC I think most gamers were getting ready for the Saturn and PS1. It can, of course, work the other way around, too I knew more people who had played Star Wars Rebel Assault on the PC than the Mega-CD version where I think I was the only one LOL, The Mega-CD was expensive and PC's far, far more so in 1993 and even by 95/6 not many people I knew had a 486 PC-CD Rom with Win95 able to handle Sonic CD it was simply too costly while in 1995 the Mega CD costs had come down drastically with shops looking to offload stock ready for the next gen.

SEGA did miss a trick twice, mind. Sonic CD should have been a part of the Sonic Jam collection, and really more so . SEGA should have remade it for the Saturn USA/Pal launch with a better looking 3D bonus section and much improved full screen Cinepak FMV. I fell that would have been more than good enough for a launch title

It was a good move by SEGA to look to port their games to Windows 95, SEGA leading the way again in many ways. To this day, I never get or understand why Sony users get so upset over their games going to the PC or why people even look to compare a PC to the console when they're different

 

Completely agree on the Sega Saturn port of Sonic CD even when I personally never owned a Saturn. Sega missed a great opportunity to port the game to a next gen Sega system. Maybe a Dreamcast port would have been a great idea too.

 

Console gaming wasn't "big" until the PlayStation released, when it hit the mainstream.

According to "Official Gallup UK Mega-CD sales chart". Mega (17). February 1994, 1,5 million copies of the Mega CD version of Sonic CD were sold . In contrast, 5 million copies of the first version of the PC port were produced and packed in. Then it got a second life as a retail game that several years later would sell for chump change along with Sonic & Knuckles Collection.

Not too much is being made about the PC version. 5 million is much more than 1,5 million.

 

Thanks .
I think by the time of the DC, most people wanted a 3D Sonic. I think Deep Fear should have been moved up to the DC and made a launch title, but that's a different depate . Even though Sonic CD sold well, a huge amount of the Mega Drive base never played Sonic CD and so it would have been new to them on the Saturn.

All SEGA would have needed to do is get rid of slowdown, improve the sound effects, have a really good looking 3D bonus stages and use Cinepak for full or near full screen top quality FMV and it would have been a nice title for those getting a Saturn in May 1995 while the team was working on the 3D game

 

I'll posit that one reason how many people got introduced to Sonic in general, but more specifically to Sonic CD was through PC gaming, but not the official kind. Rather, fangames or even Flash sprite animations that used Sonic CD music MIDIs (maybe OCRemix pieces, even?) helped spread Sonic CD farther and wider than the game itself. We often ignore or don't count these extremely accessible fangames like Ultimate Flash Sonic because they aren't """real Sonic games""", but they make up a real first experience with Sonic very often.

I know for a fact I wouldn't have known about Sonic the Fighters whatsoever during the '00s if it wasn't for Neo Sonic Universe's Dark Sky Zone and its use of Giant Wing ~ Fire Stone.

 

Console gaming was massive long before SONY came into it. I'm not a fan of Nintendo but you had to credit what they did with the Famicom and NES is Japan and USA where in was like 1 in 4 people had a NES over here in the UK the ZX Spectrum and Mega Drive was massive, bringing in millions and millions. SONY took it to the next level mind

As for Sonic CD PC/Mega CD sales, we never get proper figures and pack-ins are kind of different. To most people, JSRF and SEGA GT boomed at retail, while apparently the pack-in pack with Xbox pack sold over a million, and I would imagine if you include pack-in sales, Altered Beast on the Mega Drive it's a million seller?

And is that Gallop figure of 1.5 million just for the UK or Europe?. I would have imagined the title doing ok in the USA where SEGA CD sales were very decent

 

This statement only really applies to Europe (possibly just the UK, even). Major success as the PSX was, console gaming was pretty well established in the US by that point (barring the industry dying for ~2 years at one point) and had more than a fair market share in Japan.