Hold onto your pants, this is pretty HUGE.
Over the past weeks, Hidden Palace (along with The Cutting Room Floor) have been celebrating “Sonic Month” by releasing a number of brand new (well, “new”) Sonic prototypes. Some super early Sonic CDs, a couple more Sonic 2s (out of like a dozen now!), a bit of Sonic Chaos, even a long lost Sega CD tech demo disc. But they saved the biggest and best for last.
This is the earliest known prototype for Sonic the Hedgehog 3. It has unfinished levels. It has Sonic 2 sprites. It has scrapped animations. It has special stages that are basically just tech demos.
But get this… it also has MUSIC FROM THE PC VERSION. Sonic & Knuckles Collection included a number of different songs from the original Genesis release. It was thought that these songs were replacements for the Michael Jackson (and friends) tracks… but it turns out the MJ tracks were actually replacements for what ended up in the PC release!!
- Here's a Youtube playlist of the full soundtrack
- Here's the news post from Hidden Palace, which goes in-depth about the history of this proto and the game's development
- And here's the HP page for the proto itself (including a certain kinda link)
Give thanks to drx & co. for this monumental release! o/