I was snooPINGASusual around various cite notes and links at the bottom of Sonic articles on Sonic Retro, Sonic Wiki and plain ol’ Natopedia, as one does. I like to do this sometimes to clarify things I don’t know about Sonic, such as: gamertypes will frequently say shit like “Sonic Adventure started out on Saturn!” when in reality, it seems like Sonic Team started in April/May 1997 with Saturn as hardware and the Nights engine as their engine, found out that both were inadequate for the sweeping, story-based Sonic game they were cooking. Sonic Team was informed of the Dreamcast in June-ish 1997, at which point they stopped their work, compiled what they had (basically a tech demo) into Sonic World on Sonic Jam for Saturn, and presumably restarted everything with Dreamcast as target hardware in July 97. This makes a lot more sense, since Sonic World and Sonic Adventure have basically 0 in common :)
The last two days have seen me nosing around about Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 development & prerelease info, because Sonic 06 is such a classic. Most of it is stuff I knew about, because nothing new has been discovered lately. However I thought myself down a lil think train, to the tune of “What does the chronology look like for Sonic Team moving from the 2006 game to Unleashed?” Turns out it’s messed up! See here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20081018182131/http://blogs.ign.com/SEGA_SonicUnleashed/
According to the game’s own PRODUCER, the Hedgehog Engine that powers Unleashed was in development as of 2005. This raises so many questions: Did the team just chuck 2006’s engine together all slapdash, then? What does Sonic 06 even run on, does it have any relation to Heroes and the RenderWare stuff? How many teams did Sonic Team have if Sonic 06, Shadow the Hedgehog and Sonic Unleashed/Hedgehog engine were all in-dev at once? When Sonic Team was making both an ambitious, globally-illuminated next-gen engine and a hugely ambitious Sonic Adventure style game (06) on proprietary tech at the same time, what did that decision look like? How fucked was Sonic Team’s development pipeline?
I ask my fellow Hexbears, if you have any info on this I’d like to hear it. I had always assumed that the Hedgehog Engine was a reactionary result of how bad 06’s tech was and how poorly that game did, that they had planned on 06’s engine being their main one going forward but scrapped it immediately and rushed the Hedgehog Engine into development. Knowing that the two were developed side-by-side is brain boggling.
Bonus: here are some Youtube videos of funny unused 2006 stuff
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NjYaqcVYAKU
