SONIC JAM: The Original Origins | GEEK CRITIQUE

by 1993 the sega genesis had achieved what seemed impossible it had broken nintendo's monopoly on the video game market sega's cutting edge marketing they're cutting edge games and perhaps more than any other factor sonic the hedgehog all came together to make this a household name all of a sudden sega was not just competing with nintendo sega was winning and with so much upward momentum they seemed poised for nothing less than world domination [Music] just four years later it was all a distant memory sega's reign atop the industry already seemed like the sepia toned good old days the saturn's failure was kind of a mirror image of the genesis glory it didn't just fail to compete with nintendo's 64-bit powerhouse and sony's upstart playstation it was a distant third and what had almost immediately become a two horse race and just as sega's rise to glory had been precipitated by a number of circumstances their fall from grace was the inverse with once again perhaps none more critical than sonic the hedgehog this might seem strange in a modern context but sonic in the 90s was what would now be considered a triple a franchise sonic team was one of the most respected talented development houses in the industry and the quality consistency and reputation of this series quite literally sold millions and millions of consoles but the saturn didn't launch with a sonic game and when it finally did get one well over a year after launch it wasn't exactly a system seller saturn owners were treated to an enhanced port of sonic 3d blast a late release genesis game and i mean the revamped special stages are some of the best in the series but aside from them 3d blast was a prettier version of what was a decidedly last-gen game on the genesis it was an impressive if-flawed showcase for just how much talented developers could crank out of 16-bit hardware but on the saturn it was just a stop gap and the hole it was plugging was the one left by sonic xtreme this was meant to be the saturn's big sonic game taking full advantage of the hardware and providing direct competition to the rival sonic was created to counter sega even ran a trailer at e3 1996 suggesting that extreme was gonna be so very rad that once you experienced it even you'd be asking mario who but extreme was not being developed by sonic team it was being developed in the united states at sega technical institute and to say the project was lost in development hell would be a massive understatement by the fall of 1996 sonic xtreme was cancelled [Music] if sonic xtreme had come out it would have been a massive shot in the arm for the saturn almost regardless of how good or bad it was just having a real new sonic game would have given the saturn such a better shot of being competitive i was dying for a 3d sonic game i'd look at pictures of sonic championship that am2 fighting game in magazines and i so desperately wanted to play it but not even that was ever ported to the saturn i spent hours that summer downloading videos of sonic and streams trailers and i watched them over and over even though they were so low res i couldn't even tell what i was looking at so i know i know i'd have asked for a saturn for christmas in 1996 if a new sonic game was on it but it didn't have one so i went with something else i wonder how many people out there were like me it's important to remember that as the iconic mascot of one of the industry's biggest players sonic's reputation was irrevocably tied to segas the only way to play a sonic game was to buy a sega console and that meant that most sonic fans were bound to be sega fans as well so why would you bench your star player well this is only half the story [Music] by 1997 sega was surging the mark iii hadn't even made a dent in the famicom and the mega drive could never even knock a win against a pc engine let alone nintendo's super famicom sega had just never found much success in its home country until now the saturn was taking sega of japan to heights they never achieved before easily outpacing nintendo's 64-bit console and actually competing with the playstation let's not undersell that sega a video game company that had never done well in japan before was holding its own against sony one of the biggest richest most powerful electronics companies in the world outside of japan the saturn's lag of a system-selling sonic game was one of the major factors in its failure but in japan it didn't matter virtua fighter alone was a bigger system seller than sonic would have been anyway and given that sonic team had pumped out 5 of them in just 3 years you can't blame them for being a little burnt out on the blue blur so sonic team cashed out their goodwill in exchange for freedom and chose to pursue new endeavors on the saturn and the most famous of these was knights into dreams now knights was no mario killer but then again in 1996 nothing would have been what it was was an extremely impressive game with a ton of heart a ton of creativity and a lot of vision behind it this was the game that sonic team wanted to make and i will always think it deserved better than it got it's my go-to example of a cult classic but knights was also the game where that famous sonic team logo made its debut you know the one and this might be the most telling indication of how trivial sonic had been in japan to that point sonic team leads yuchinaka and noto oshima said this in a 1997 interview with saturn power when we made knights we received a lot of letters asking us what the sonic team was and who sonic was in the west the saturn was buckling without a sonic game in the east the saturn was doing better but sega's mascot was so much of a non-factor that he was unrecognizable this formed the impetus behind an initiative the sonic team announced at the 1997 tokyo game show project sonic the goal to get more sonic games onto the saturn to effectively relaunch the franchise in the east and you know just as a bonus it might also help the saturn be a little more competitive internationally yeah the disconnect between sega of japan and sega of america was never more pronounced than it was during the saturn era the first title to be released under this new initiative was the one and only sonic game the team that bore his name would ever develop for the saturn and while it may have been intended to introduce new fans to the legacy of the series what it came to represent those few western saturn owners was a rare treasure trove of fan service quality and authenticity which added up to something greater than the sum of its parts let's get critiquing [Music] now that we're past the whole historical context part of the video and we've hopefully weeded out all those weirdos who don't think retrospecting is important for a retrospective it's probably time to answer a question what exactly am i doing here if i'm back making sonic videos yet again isn't it time to move on to the boost era games instead of jumping back to discuss a compilation on a console nobody even had is sonic game actually worth talking yes yes yes a million times yes sonic jam is something worth celebrating and the fact that nobody knows why is a huge part of the reason why i want to i think if you know anything about jam at all it's probably the basics it contains sonic 1 2 3 and knuckles as well as some sort of 3d museum mode but what makes it so special what makes it worth playing even and really especially if you already own all the games it contains is in its details and its authenticity and if you haven't ever been able to get into the series well sonic jam is catered especially well to you too let's face it the og sonic games are old school and they regularly live up to that reputation while it may be the case that in their own time they were often derided as being too forgiving seen from a modern context the difficulty curve is littered with spikes that may come across as unfair and like that's almost a core tenant of sonic games in general at this point it's why some of the ones that the fans like the best are so off-putting to everyone else the skill curve just kind of beats the crap out of you until you learn the physics and get a feel for the flow of level design it can be hard for me to see it but there really is a lot in here that you won't know until you know but even as early as 1997 this approach to difficulty and replayability was already pretty outdated and so all four games in this collection now have difficulty options original has everything just like it was on the original hardware but normal mode smooths out those harsh difficulty spikes and strives for something more fair more modern and less focused on forcing you to waste 20 dollars of your parents money calling the sega tips hotline just to learn what you're supposed to do here i wonder how many hours of my childhood i spent doing this or take this part in chemical plant zone i think everyone who owned a genesis remembers this one two zones of high speed thrills then you're just unceremoniously terminated from having any more fun until you can master the intricacies of sonic's sluggish underwater movement i think this one room is why that drowning music is so traumatic to people of course there are ways to avoid it if you have really good timing or if you just happen to know another way around i mean there's a whole other path up here that just skips the water entirely and then drops you off right before the boss i didn't even know about this until i've been playing the game for like 20 years these games are so good the point is in normal mode the challenge isn't completely gone but it's evened out it's more manageable the difficulty spikes are flattened back into difficulty curves you even get rings in the final zones oh and the special stages are easier the ring counts are lowered in half pipe this one's probably easier in some way i don't know i'm not gonna play it and blue spheres never speeds up oh and uh by the way the blue spheres game you get in jam by locking on sonic 1 uh it doesn't have an original mode and so therefore it also never speeds up i'm sure all the hardcore blue spheres fans are gonna be real mad at sega for nerfing the difficulty on that one for easy mode challenges are simplified even further bosses go down in just three hits and you skip entire acts outright if you're someone who struggles with old school difficulty this might make for a perfect way to get acclimated and even as someone who knows these games so well easy mode is surprisingly a nice value it's fun having a sampler platter of angel island i can speed through in like 20 minutes oh and independently of which difficulty mode you choose you can also disable timeovers entirely that's right no more running out of time in sonic 3's elephantine stage design now maybe these options don't sound like a big deal to you or i i probably know these games better than the back of my hand and the last time i got a time over i think it was literally 1995. but set your own experience aside and look at this from a newcomer's perspective this isn't just like a rewind option or implementing save states this is the original sonic team at a time when the developers of these games were all still working at sega going back and giving their own games a new coat of polish this is a more accessible experience but it's no less authentic this in my opinion has gone uncelebrated and under-appreciated more than anything else about sonic jam and like of course it's unappreciated the only people who owned a saturn outside of japan were sega die-hards who'd already been playing sonic for ages even when i was a kid all i ever picked was original we didn't stand to benefit from difficulty options but still if these difficulty options were more accessible if perhaps they had been included in later compilations it might have helped temper that sentiment about early sonic games being too hard that got its rise in the past decade or so instead even now these modes are locked to the saturn and i think i know why every other collection for decades to come would use emulation as its backbone but the games in sonic jam have actually been ported to the sega saturn hardware these are not just roms on a disk now given the state of emulation back then this was probably born out of necessity and it comes with a lot of upside sonic and knuckles comes complete with all of its lock-on functionality and i know for a fact emulators couldn't do that yet in 97 but there are some cons too while the gameplay and physics are perfect the game's speed has a few quirks sonic 2 especially seems prone to little pockets of slow down at the strangest times maybe when it's streaming in new assets from the disk they also sound a bit different sometimes the sound effects all run directly through saturn hardware and while most of them come out pretty much the same others tend to lack that punchy genesis aura in favor of a more high fidelity effect [Music] [Music] some of them are also mixed to be too loud which uh makes sandopolis act two even more tedious than usual [Music] but as you might have noticed the music is identical instead of trying to rewrite the music to work with the saturn sound hardware sonic team recorded each game's soundtrack directly out of a model 1 mega drive's 3.5 millimeter port and store these tracks as individual files on a cd the downside there is that the music can't be as modular get the speed views and the music doesn't speed up where it is it starts over from the beginning [Music] it also has to do that for the extra life jingle invincibility or even the level clear music tracks can only ever play from the beginning but the upside might be worth it because the music is no longer sharing any channels with the sound effects icecap act 2 has this melancholy piano solo but it tends to get mangled under the sound effects on original hardware [Music] but on the saturn of course all of this has a negligible effect on the games themselves it could be oh damn it the music skipping a handful of you may remember kailyn who was the other guy on a very old let's play channel he once spilled his cream soda all over my saturn games it was 1998 he was four years old and he had still never apologized so i guess that's another downside to having the games on a cd just don't let kaelyn near them yuki naka prided himself on his pixel perfect programming and his sonic games rarely experienced any slowdown in single-player except when tons of sprites were drawn on screen but that only really happened when yeah when you can't control the character anyway but the saturn cues through that like it's nothing or take the cutting edge full motion intro of sonic 3 where the genesis just jugs with the saturn's muscle though even that's eradicated the level select is still impossible for mere mortals to pull off but at least now it's for a different reason the fact that the potential is there makes it a real shame that the one mainline game that did suffer from notable slowdown on original hardware wasn't included in sonic jam sonic cd was an unfortunate emission but hey you know a better version was only what 14 years away but the biggest benefactor of the saturn hardware by a mile is sonic 2's multiplayer mode which sort of devolved into a slideshowy mess on original hardware especially in mystic cave zone but again the saturn is a 2d powerhouse and it slices and dice a split screen without breaking a sweat which would be great fun if i knew anyone in real life who would also spend a good chunk of their existence playing sonic 2. but that's not the only benefactor of the old sonic team working on this game we're just getting started you might remember this one what does everyone do when they try to play sonic 1 that's right duck and jump so the biggest mechanical change to jam offers to any of its games is fully implementing the spin dash in sonic 1 at a time when rom hacking wasn't yet even a twinkle in nemesis eye i know people who bought a whole saturn just so they could finally play sonic 1 with the spin dash all four games also get full time attack leader boards for each stage and huh look at that the layouts in time attack are all based on normal mode almost like sonic team consider this the definitive version all the games also have a special stage mode that lets you try for all the chaos emeralds in one go and you know special stages at least the result screen is pretty look maybe this seems like too much granular detail but i really want to emphasize how sure-footed this is how much finesse and polish is programmed into this collection so you get all that plus digital manuals in both japanese and english which is how i realized that we americans got ripped off the japanese manuals are so much longer with full-color pages in-depth breakdowns of each zone and original artwork but my favorite part are these little hand-drawn doodles showing off how different gameplay mechanics and stage gimmicks work they're genuinely funny incredibly charming and simple enough that even i could copy them when i was bored in school so look if this was all sonic jam was if it was just the stuff behind the game's menu it would still be a robust collection of fantastic games with enough new accoutrements and additions that it wouldn't just be perfect for new players it'd be a nice value add even for die hards but that's not all there is to sonic jam that other option on the menu is called sonic world and it takes you to the first ever look at how epic how incredible and how revolutionary a 3d sonic platformer [Music] could be you know so often i get to sit here and say things like guys i know how this comes across now but we've never seen anything like it before in its own time it was hard to imagine how graphics could even get better than this i mean i've done it with this very series before but even in 1997 i can't say this exactly blew me away here's the thing for the saturn this wasn't just impressive it was like sonic team cast a magic spell to get the hardware to do things it shouldn't really even be capable of i can't think of another 3d game on this platform that runs this smoothly and with so much draw distance 3d saturn games nearly always had heaps of polygonal pop in or fade in if you were traveller's tails but here you can actually see from one end of sonic world all the way to the other but here's the thing as impressive as it was for the saturn sonic world's graphics were really only just comparable to games that had come out a year earlier on psx and n64 and in the early days of 3d gaming one year might as well have been 10. keeping that in mind though i do think the design work put into sonic world elevates it considerably the map isn't sprawling but it makes the most of its space two plateaus are central connected by a wooden bridge a waterfall flows into a river which twists and turns throughout while stone archways and totem poles help tie the world into sonic's recurring ancient ruins theme each of the five museum buildings has a unique unmistakable design so every area feels distinct these early 3d spaces especially in retrospect can come across as kind of stale and artificial or even uncanny but sonic world comparatively feels alive no matter where you look there's always something moving the green hill totem poles are repurposed as wind spinners flickies of all colors flutter about tails flies independently around the map and can even give you a boost and these low poly characters i i'll never get enough of this aesthetic even the sound design is on point as depending on where you are on the map you might hear wind rustling or the river rushing the music though i mean it's okay but it's maybe too bombastic for what this is i think something a little more stylish something more reverent something more in the vein of dreams come true's classic compositions would have made for a better fit so yeah it's not that it wasn't awesome to finally see what a 3d sonic game might look like it just seemed clear that as bernie stoller so unfortunately put it the saturn was not the future it wasn't the platform that could make that lead to 3d happen for this series because even this was pushing far past the boundaries of what the saturn should be able to do and it would still take a map exponentially bigger than this one to capture the speed that gave sonic his name but here's what's cool about that sonic world was built directly out of what the team was working on and it's crazy even more so with hindsight to see this almost alternate universe version of the game that would become sonic adventure let's talk gameplay sonic's movement does do that gradual momentum ramp up but his max speed is nothing to write home about weirdly enough using the analog stick lets you hit max speed a lot faster than the d-pad gupping feels just like the classics they hadn't yet incorporated that more forgiving floatier jump that sonic adventure would use but they did have were adventurous camera controls using the triggers to rotate the field of view the camera itself offers a near mode that gives a better sense of speed a far mode that's more useful and an unlockable cinematic mode that's hard to play with but i guess it looks pretty sonic's basic controls are on point but the basics are all he's got no rolling no spin dash no momentum just running and jumping and like that's okay the basics are all you really need for something like this but i do remember being a bit underwhelmed by how nearly adequate his speed is he's supposed to be the blue blur not the blue barge but cruising around does have its benefits there are monitors hidden around the world containing key codes for the games included which was a godsend at a time when only one in five u.s households had internet access you didn't have to run to your friend's house to get into print codes for you and that brings us to the actual game within sonic world step on this big pinwheel that's uh kind of unnerving for some reason and a task will come up the mika mode is simple but it's a nice way to utilize the full layout of the map there's a mission where you find all the cheat monitors platform your way up to pop balloons and touch miles once you've finished all the missions oh a giant gold ring appears above the waterfall it just leads to the credits but man just look at these renders i don't know if sonic and tails ever looked better than this this just perfectly captures the charm of sonic's original design that juxtaposition between an enduring cute character who is simultaneously this cool determined self-assured badass mission mode might be basic and sonic might be a bit of a slo-mo but that's all gravy anyway the sonic world is a museum first and foremost the idea of a virtual space memorializing video game history was popularized by the namco museum series a few years earlier and it is barn on one of my favorite things a compilation can do you know what i said earlier about how elegantly jam is programmed that applies in spades here console programmers back then sometimes had a tough time handling loading screens in namco museum volume 1 just to look at anything took a long loading screen to get you in and another to get you out but sonic world somehow has no visible loading screens whatsoever i don't know where they found the memory for this stuff in the saturn and why they couldn't find it in the 7th gen the music shop is basically a unified sound test for every game in the collection letting you listen to the full range of music and sound effects the character house contains profiles for the cast as well as concept art height charts and instructions for how the characters show emotion and when the ova was localized a few years later i remember thinking it was cool how well jam's profiles tied into it knuckles hates bright sunlight tails is afraid of lightning and robotnik is wait what's an eggman the art gallery features an extensive collection of well art most of which was originally drawn for sega's company newsletter i adore these pieces i think a lot of fans do they capture sonic's 90s pop art style to perfection but i've saved the best two for last first there's the movie theater it's sonic it's cool movie cool yeah i know but that's how i read it as a kid but hey it is cool and it was only 23 years away the movie theater contains a ton of content you get both the opening and ending of sonic cd and way higher quality than the sega cd original and backed by this strange song that i had never heard before [Music] yeah i had no idea back in 97 that there even was another soundtrack for sonic cd and that kind of set the tone for the rest of the movies and in a way for sonic jam as a whole it's all this obscure content previously unreleased concepts japanese commercials and a ridiculously awesome short called man of the year which seems to have been some sort of a concept test for a sonic cartoon [Music] can't even tell you how many times i watch these videos and finally the hall of fame is a detailed curated history of the series to that point cataloging every game release regional variation and major event i soaked up every last line of this i loved it at one time i even had the freaking release dates memorized that's just how invested i was in this stuff in the early days of the internet and i mean like the actual early days not the early internet that quentin reviews describes as being like 2009 i mean by then youtube was already a household word mike's face was already dead and neil cicerega was already parodying the actual early internet oh god i sound like my dad real ass cars when they didn't have no rules anyway on the early internet saying you were a sonic fan almost always meant you were a fan of this look back on english language communities artwork news groups of the time and the american canon was always the default the front page of one of the biggest sonic fan sites on the net used this name for the character without explanation or context because everybody already knew that was his name they already knew why that's how widespread it was so the comparatively small group of fans in the 90s who preferred the games canon would differentiate what they liked by calling it sega sonic the real sonic as some of them call it the phantom of the 1990s was all real young but fans were still fans and the discourse was still the discourse personally i've always disagreed with this notion that sonic was only supposed to be one thing the sonic franchise character and elements were all designed by committee and his adaptability was part of that design baked with intent into the creation of the series it was always meant to be different in different markets and in different mediums and in the long term even in different decades because what was cool in 1991 might not be in 2001 what worked in a 16-bit platformer couldn't carry a cartoon series what made a character work in the west might not work in the east but no matter what or when it is it's all still sonic the hedgehog the series is versatile most long-ranging series have to be and that's a strength not a weakness of course i'm not saying there's anything wrong with having your own tastes and preferences lord knows i do just keep an open mind and remember that despite what metal sonic said there was never only one sonic there is no one true vision of the character the tone the world or even the game design there was never supposed to be and honestly this very ability is one of the things i always found fascinating about the series sonic isn't always going to be exactly what you want but that doesn't mean anything that breaks from your ideal is without merit the series has been so many things but they're all the real sonic the way i feel about this stuff might be exactly what made jam so special imagine what it was like to see this for the first time with no context for what it was with sonic jam i was thrust headlong into a version of the series i loved that i'd never quite seen in full focus before sonic cam was pure unfiltered sega sonic and as a kid who loved this just as much as all of these as a kid who had been introduced to the very concept of a multiverse of one series branching into many different versions of itself because of sonic the hedgehog getting to see it through another new lens was just incredible 10 years ago i might have still argued that jam was the definitive way to play the classics at this point though i think the retro engine remakes and fan made projects like sonic 3 air have definitely outclassed it but still call me sentimental and i am but there's nothing quite like playing sonic games on sega hardware but what if you could play these games somewhere else what if you could play sonic games on dare i say nintendo hardware why they were the enemy actually when sonic mega collection was first teased people were over the moon most sonic fans on the internet back then were still sega kids so a lot of us had saturns and even the ones who didn't knew about jam so everyone was just waiting to see how sonic team would outdo themselves maybe we'd get a new 3d museum an updated history section oh maybe they'd get the international commercials this time sonic cd should definitely be in there this time and oh maybe they'll even add new stuff to the games or put knuckles in sonic 1 or nope nope nope none of that mega collection wasn't even close it did have a really slick menu system and some great music but its extras amounted to arky comic covers the sonic cd movies two advertisements for other sonic games now available on nintendo platforms and a bunch of unaltered roms of games we already owned what an amazing deal also they forgot one what the heck sega oh yeah it also had this history of sonic movie and look it's just blatantly lying about sonic jam sonic game wasn't the big jump to 3d it was a better compilation than this one why did you not want people to know about that and yep even this movie supposedly celebrating the series history ends with yet another glorified advertisement for sonic adventure 2 battle but you know what's weird in spite of all the cynicism even though i felt like i should know better and even though i knew everyone at the mughal cavern was going to dunk on me i took one look at this box art and i mean i couldn't not pick it up and you know what i didn't regret it here's what happened the first time i booted it up [Music] it felt like it had been so long since i'd heard that sound and it was just i don't know really nice and really convenient to have every single 16-bit sonic game on one disc plus it had a handful of sonic and case in games unlockable mega collect can introduce me to wrist star and wrist star rules so yeah i'm glad it happened this was kind of the first of oh so many times i would learn to be skeptical of the way that most fandoms but especially ones centered around children's media tend to have a small but vocal contention of older fans we were just frothing to tear down everything a series is while showing infinite almost obtuse reverence for the way that it used to be but more than what mega collection meant to me i'm truly thankful it happened for what it meant to the next generation so it didn't live up to jam's precedent but the only people who knew that were us die-hard sega weirdos who had actually bought a saturn while all those 16-bit compilations that just kept coming out through the 2000s seemed underwhelming and repetitive at the time even the worst of them still contains some of the best games ever made they made it so that some of the same games we grew up loving in the 90s would also be formative to kids of the 2000s and beyond as fractured as sonic fandom can be we'd be even worse off if we didn't at least have that common ground and as if to prove my point i just now learned like right at this point in the editing of this episode that that mediocre ds compilation that is nonetheless like crazy nostalgic to kids of the 2010s used music from sonic cam on its menu i had no idea they did that just like i'm sure the kids playing it back then had no idea where it was from that's so cool as i write these words it's been well over a decade since the last sonic compilation but sonic origins is on its way next year i'm hoping it can realize the best of both legacies like mega collection origin stands to introduce a new audience a new generation to these legendary titles and if it can do that with the reverence and authenticity of sonic jam if it can dare i say it outshine sonic jam then we are really gonna have something special on our hands maybe it'll even have a new 3d sonic world okay so this is a reach i know but a clothing line recently put out an ad for sonic merch which featured all these saturn-style 3d models and come on where else would these assets have come from i'm keeping my fingers crossed you know there's something about sonic jam that's strangely wistful maybe even a little sad like i said sonic's reputation was tied inexorably to sega's he was the icon of their hardware so how the saturn was perceived reflected on how sonic was perceived sonic jam feels like the team that bore his name taking a breath as if they were looking back to see where they stood reminiscing on glory that it turned out to be as fleeting as the icon himself in that space they made a compilation that nearly 25 years later still stands unrivaled in some areas like finding an oasis in the middle of a drought long before our dreams were be cast sonic's original creators made what was at once a loving tribute to all that had come before a bittersweet glimpse of what might have been and a captivating peek at where the blue blur was heading all these years later sonic still continues to spin toward the future nothing will stop him [Music] you

Channel: The Geek Critique

Views: 208,188

Keywords: The Geek Critique, TGC, Geek Critique, Josh Wallen

Id: -aS8cjwwrSI

Length: 35min 40sec (2140 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 24 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/MerelyAFan]

Another great Geek Critique video where he examines the background of Sonic Jam, the unique features that have never been included again, and the context of the franchise at the time of its release.

[u/StarandIcon]

aw yeah i love the geek critiques retrospectives

Its where i learnt of... the other Sonic Jam