Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (PROTOTYPE) LOST BITS | Cut Content & Debug Mode [TetraBitGaming]

[Music] hey guys and welcome back to another lost bits video right here on tetra bei gaming where we explore the unused scrapped and unseen content in video games and back we are again with yet another Sonic video if you haven't heard recently as of the making of this video a newly discovered prototype has been dropped by the hidden palace and the cutting room floor now I know a lot of you have been waiting for a proper sonic three lost bits video but this prototype has so much to talk about that I'll be keeping this video dedicated to just it but I will make separate videos on both the final game as well as Sonic and Knuckles eventually anyways enough talk it's time to pull our socks up and dash into some Sonic 3 lost bits [Music] sporting a build date of November 3rd 1993 this newly found prototype was just three months away from its initial release in North America so let's see just how much was altered and scrapped in that time and what better way to start then with the title screen what is that this title screen honestly looks like it could be from one of those bootleg 1 billion in 1 Chinese knockoff games it's quite obvious there are many differences in this very basic looking title screen from what is seen in the final release although making a similar pose Sonics model appears to be pretty different or is at least viewed from a different angle the ring is also at a different angle the banner and title text are blue instead of red and yellow respectively there's no menu or copyright dates and oh yeah there's no background at all and since there's no menu there's no proper way to start or continue the game and instead pressing start on the controller will take you right to the level select screen which I'm not gonna lie is pretty nifty now we'll get into the nitty-gritty of the stages and how they changed in a bit but first let's talk about some general gameplay and graphical differences that spend the entire prototype first and foremost although using a new Sonic 3 color palette Sonic and Tails both still use their sprites from Sonic 2 here other notable graphical differences include the star sprites missing from invincibility the game over graphic being also left over from Sonic 2 glitchy title cards and finally both protagonists lack any sort of victory pose when completing a stage and will instead just default to their hurt animation it's actually kind of funny I like it then as far as gameplay differences go the special stages and their giant rings aren't implemented yet bonus stages aren't accessible even though sparkles of peer above the check points if Sonic has over 50 rings tails has infinite flight power which is honestly pretty nifty and all the elemental shields lack their effects so the flame shield won't protect you from fire damage or let you do the fire dash attack the Lightning shield won't attract rings and the bubble shield won't let you breathe underwater this build also uses different speed and heavy shoes icons in competition mode here they just appear as an S with an up or down arrow instead of a red or gray shoe although the special stages aren't playable in this prototype meaning you can't get any Chaos Emeralds to unlock Super Sonic coding for him still exists again like we saw with the Sonic 2 prototypes the only way to access Super Sonic here is to destroy an s monitor that can be placed in with the help of the game's debug mode Super Sonic works basically the same here as in Sonic 2 except that only the invincibility music plays instead of a unique song that said there is a unique theme meant for Super Sonic left over in the build that I guess goes left unused [Music] and apparently due to an issue with Sonic's color palettes it will glitch out after the supersonic transformation wears out this is very apparent in underwater segments just like in the Sonic 2 prototypes super Sonics color palette messes up when underwater and here supersonic turns pink and then when the power wears off normal sonic appeared in a nice shade of magenta for me Sonic fanfic writers eat your heart out there's not much for unused graphics in this prototype just this thing what's believed to be some sort of button that was to be pressed by knuckles like he does in carnival night zone finally and what I think is one of the most interesting discoveries in this prototype is that Sonic has the ability to perform a drop - like move by jumping while pressing up this is similar to a move seen in Sonic mania and was first believed to be brought on by Christian Whitehead or the tax man who spearheaded development on the game however he claims that this is mere uncanny coincidence and that his drop - move from Sonic mania wasn't influenced by this prototype I think before we move on apparently this prototype has some leftover data from Star Trek The Next Generation echoes from the past now having Star Trek data left over in a Sonic game is pretty bizarre and sure both games were published by Sega and on the Genesis but this game was developed by spectrum holobyte an American developer with no other known ties to the sonic franchise the leftover data is just references to source code for the Star Trek game so no there isn't some hidden Captain Picard cutscene but just the fact that it is there is really weird my only thought is that since both of these games released in 1994 their development timeline probably overlaps so the EPROM chip that this prototype was originally written to might have had the Star Trek data first before being overwritten with the sonic 3 rom and some leftovers remained now next up we have some audio differences in this build as well sorry let me rephrase that next up we have an absolute soif of audio differences in this build the likes of which I don't think we've ever seen in a lost fits video before we get to the big stuff just like we saw with Sonic 2 there are still several audio bugs in this prototype stuff like random sounds bugging out the sound of collecting a ring only plays in the right speaker bosses don't have any sound effects there is no act clear jingle yet and for some reason when getting the speed shoes instead of the music speeding up the invincibility theme we'll play instead and we'll continue even after the speed effect wears off so one of the biggest new discoveries that people found in his prototype is the music in the stages during the hidden Palace livestream viewers were quick to point out that the music used was the same that was later used in the PC release of the game in the Sonic and Knuckles collection now there is a lot of history with Sonic 3 and it's music which I won't dive into here but if you're interested in learning more about it I definitely recommend you check out a brief history of it by the d-pad I'll have a link for you down in the description anyways just for some context I'll give you my own quick rundown of it so as far as I understand it with Masato Nakamura the composer of the first 2 Sonic games not getting the gig for the third since he felt he should be paid more due to the success of the other two Sonic games Sega was left without a music director for Sonic 3 enter Michael Jackson yes that Michael Jackson apparently he and his team had caught wind of Sonic 3 needing a new music director and jumped on the opportunity and Sega accepted long story short if you know the history of Michael Jackson there was a point where a lot of allegations were made against him so eventually apparently Sega made the decision to scrub MJ's involvement from Sonic 3 that said the tracks that he and several artists that he collaborated with apparently were left in for the final game and unmistakable similarities between them and some later released songs by Michael Jackson and the people he collaborated with like Brad buck sir are pretty apparent I'll steal two examples from the d-pads video here to show you what I mean [Music] so what does all of this have to do with this prototype you might be wondering well since the prototype uses a completely different soundtrack at this point again about nine weeks before the final release this is still quite the mystery with the final version of Sonic 3 using the Michael Jackson soundtrack why would this prototype from only a few months before release still use a different soundtrack I think the two most probable solutions are a this build has the true original soundtrack before Michael Jackson was brought on to health and they must have gone full crunch time mode to get the soundtrack reworked in only a matter of weeks or B Michael Jackson and his squad helped out before this build and this was from a point in development where they were trying to scrub Michael Jackson's involvement with the game and replace his work with a different soundtrack but then that begs the question why would they have added the Michael Jackson music back in for the final release later if this was the case so yeah it's all a big conundrum anyways with all of that talk about the soundtrack let's quickly go through just how much some of the tracks have changed [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] for those not totally familiar with the development of Sonic 3 originally both Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles were supposed to be one game as the developers wanted the game to be much bigger than the Sonic games before it but due to technical limitations and apparently Sega wanting the game to be released in time for some sort of promotional deal with McDonald's the game was split into two thanks McDonald's anyways it seems this prototype was built after the decision to split the two games was made since although accessible the Sonic and Knuckles zones are ends well at least they aren't playable to say the least we'll get back to these in a bit but even though these stages have been basically removed their music still fully remains in the game I won't play them all here since they're just part of the Sonic and Knuckles soundtrack but I think it's cool to know that this build of Sonic 3 still has the music from the zones that were scrapped from it's to form its sequel alright now let's get into the finer details and differences in the actual levels in this prototype I'll be going through the game level by levels so of course let's start off with Angel Island zone right away we can see that the intro sequence is different instead of Sonic riding on the tornado and turning into Super Sonic like in the final game here instead he just rides a surfboard on to the island with some hella glitchy graphics then right after in this build instead of punching sonic and stealing the Chaos Emeralds knuckles just stopped Sonic for a bit and basically invites Sonic to follow him just like sonic here knuckles the enchilada 2 has a different looking sprite compared to what's used in the final game and apparently because they use the same palette knuckles causes the heads-up display to glitch out into a sideways Nigerian flag what's even more interesting is that the final intro style with a tornado and Super Sonic is still found in the game mostly but it certainly isn't complete as its softlocks shortly after getting to knuckles I suppose maybe at this point the developers were still deciding between the two intro sequences then as far as the acts go the underwater timer graphics don't load properly here some graphics are messed up and some sound effects are different or missing all in all the level is mostly complete in terms of playability but as you can see in these comparisons of the maps several changes were made to it to improve it aesthetically like filling up empty space or getting rid of these infinite waterfalls I might as well get into the debug mode now as there's a really weird effect it has in this zone by pressing up up down down up up on the title screen the debug mode can be accessed and just like every other classic Sonic game we've covered so far it lets us fly around and place in several objects that are normally used or unused with debug mode we can also fly back into the intro Beach area and see that just outside of normal view is a lot of garbage I don't know why this is here but let's be thankful that this isn't normally visible also if you miss Sonic riders here in Angel Island zone with debug enabled we can spawn in several of the surfboarding Sonic's here for some reason they don't do much except for surf around for a bit and cause the game to lag and Sonic's sprite to glitch out additionally we can spawn in this weird rotating red sphere bunch that looks like it's from the special stage which we'll touch on later and then finally what I was talking about earlier there's this other strange object that can be accessed I've honestly never seen anything like this it just like instantly completely messes up the stages graphics and level collision apparently this object is used to test sprite scaling as we can see the glitched out graphics shrink and then grow again honestly it's just one of the strangest phenomena I think I've ever seen in a classic Sonic game okay now onto hydrocity hydra city whatever the water zone with the good music here again the zone starts out different as both Sonic and Tails just fall down in their idle pose instead of a proper falling animation also the background in act 1 is completely different from the final game and interestingly this background appears to be the one that was used for the icon in the level select screen in the final release speaking of the background this build also seems to have troubles loading it in in some parts after Sonic dies at higher elevations maybe this was why it was changed other major differences here include again several missing sound effects rings overlapping these tubes and blue knuckles and speaking of blue knuckles I didn't mention this earlier but if you finish a level as just tails for whatever reason the signpost will also default to the incorrectly color to kidnoh marble garden zone is up next and aside from the usual buggy graphics and missing audio there's not much to say about this one save for in this bill if you start much closer to the ground and you don't fall from the sky like in the final game there's also a bunch of stuff found under the stage that's not normally accessible I don't really know why this would be left here for a carnival night zone the boss area is quite different as this bill doesn't really have any walls and the game basically softlocks after defeating the boss here then as far as act 2 goes Nux doesn't make an appearance here and such the flooding and blackout scene in the final game aren't implemented here either yet finally since these tubes don't work properly the only legit way to get up to the robotic fight here is to use tails to carry you up to the top or of course you can just use the debug mode as far as ice cap zone goes outside of a few misplaced spikes the only real differences here are at the start of act 1 and the end of act 2 here instead of snowboarding down the mountain Sonic just runs down instead and apparently too fast for the camera to handle I'm glad they changed this as snowboarding just gives it that much of a needed pinch of variety and then at the end of act 2 although the tunnel leading to launch base zone that Sonic normally goes through is present here in this build it just isn't used in the transition to the next zone because it doesn't exist and instead we're left with another softlock going off of that transition the start of launch base zone is also different as here sonic doesn't plow through the snow and instead just starts on top of it the background here too uses a different palette that results in a purple sky and greenish Death Egg just like with hydro city's own earlier this is the stage style that was used as the level select icon in the final game then as far as the rest of the act goes at the end after Knuckles bombs the whole tower the tower doesn't collapse and then the game pretty much softlocks as I couldn't get to the boss fight as far as act 2 goes there's this weird beeping and slide whistle sound effect that seems to occur when sonic jumps out of water when he's not fully submerged [Music] [Applause] [Music] this only appears to happen in certain areas like when jumping from this platform here but it can also be heard in other parts of hydro city zone since the sound isn't playable in the sound test it is believed that this just may be some sort of bug with the splash sound effects whatever the case may be it's pretty weird anyway at the cutscene at the end of launch base act 2 sonic will at one point just freeze up and just like several of the other act twos here the game will softlock once again okay so those are all the zones that are normally playable in Sonic 3 what although I said that the Sonic and Knuckles zones were scrapped that's not entirely true as some remnants from them can still be found in this build ranging from hey this is pretty good - what the [ __ ] let's start off with a good shall we so despite being a Sonic and Knuckles own flying battery is still accessible here and although it's pretty rough it's at least playable it lacks animated tiles the background is different and once again matches that scene in the level select icon and this background is used for both the indoor as well as outdoor segments when comparing the act Maps you can see just how much was changed for the final Sonic and Knuckles version there's just a whole lot of normally inaccessible stuff everywhere yeah to call the stage and completes would be an understatement what that's nothing compared to what we have in store next ladies and gentlemen welcome to a mushroom Valley Zone yeah this is all that remains of the zone here with debug mode you can still see that there's some collision data here and you can still place in badniks and other objects but without it you always just instantly die when entering the stage sans awfulest - is all kinds of messed up but it still has its collision intact in the same way so you can still play through it kinda if you're into visual pain lava reef zone is also messed up but fans were able to restore it by forcing the game to load some required data that said the collision is still pretty funky also the background here is still pretty buggered up the rest of the Sonic and Knuckles owns are basically equally as messed up as we saw earlier this includes sky sanctuary death egg and the doomsday zone there's also some extra unused stage here with the ID 0d and apparently it's still found left over in the final build of Sonic 3 in each case here it looks like all of these zones are using graphics and palette data from Angel Island zone furthermore there's zone ID 16 acts 1 & 2 which were later repurposed into lava reef zone act 3 and the hidden Palace zone respectively not to be confused with the hidden Palace zone of Sonic 2 then here is zone ID 17 which similarly had its acts later repurposed or the Death Egg zone boss fight and the alternate version of the hidden Palace zone with the normal stages done now let's get to some of the special stages first there's an early version of the gumball bonus stage obviously some graphics are missing and there is no collision coded here either and since the machine doesn't really do anything and there's no collision there's really not much to the stage in this prototype then for the bonus games that got cut to be put in Sonic and Knuckles first there's the glowing spheres bonus stage that just has motionless spheres everywhere although the background is again missing I don't know I think it almost looks kind of cool to be honest again this is very incomplete to the point that there is really nothing to do here then we have the slot machine and hey what do you know an actual background once again collision isn't implemented here yet so it's not really playable it is interesting to note some of the changes to the graphics here though the slot machine itself saw some pretty big changes like the center hole as well as the squares and triangles and also the slot icons were altered and I think made worse in the final release especially with the eyes of Sonic Tails and Knuckles and last but most definitely not least are the blue sphere special stages well in this build the special stage nor the blue spheres exist yet and all that remains is basically a tech demo of sorts to show the 3d style graphics the game was capable of special state one consists of a central sphere like object with the red spheres moving around it although there's no real playable mini game here you as the player can control how the spheres behave you can toggle between manual and automatic rotation change the rotation direction zoom in and out of the spheres adjust rotation speed and more special stage 2 is kinda similar except this time less sphere rotation and more pyramid here not only can you control the sphere rotation and viewing angle but also toggle between an animation where the spheres and contract I think both of these special stage demos are just so relaxing to watch I feel like you could just slow it down give it some music slap on some artwork and make it into an awesome vaporwave video and that's basically all of the noteworthy things and changes in this newly discovered sonic 3 prototype and I hope you enjoyed this video if you did be sure to slap a like down below and check out my other sonic lost bits videos like the Sonic CD one I recently made by clicking on the card 8 here again a special thanks to the hidden Palace and cutting room floor for sharing all of these awesome prototypes with all of us it's been an absolutely crazy month for sonic prototypes but I'm definitely excited to take a little bit of a break from all these sonic videos also be sure to swing by my other social media things which are all linked in the description below and if you want to support the channel check out my merch at tetra becaming com or consider becoming the latest member of the bit club click on the join button below for more information anyways guys thanks for tuning in and I will see you in a bit [Music]

Channel: TetraBitGaming

Views: 839,245

Keywords: Sonic 3, Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic, Sonic Trailer, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, Sonic 3 Prototype, Sonic 3 Michael Jackson, Sonic 3 Prototype Music, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 Prototype, Sonic 3 Prototype Drop Dash, Sonic 3 Drop Dash, TetraBitGaming, TetraBit, TBG Common, Lost Bits, Sonic 3 Lost Bits, Sonic Lost Bits, Hidden Palace Zone Sonic 3, Sonic Prototype, Sonic 3 Beta, Sonic the hedgehog 3 beta, Sonic 3 beta music, Sonic 3 prototype launch base, Sonic Movie, gaming, video games, sega

Id: TxaDg3UITow

Length: 25min 12sec (1512 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 30 2019