The Most Obscure Sonic Games

so recently my favorite sonic youtuber cybershell made a big return to youtube back in 2017 he released a video trying to pinpoint the most obscure sonic game ever in a tribute to cybershell's return and in an attempt to flex my own obscure sonic muscles i've compiled a list of some even more obscure sonic games i've split the video up into three categories let's get going with the first in this quest to discover the most obscure sonic game in history if you watch this video to the end and you've heard of every game mentioned well i'll um i'll print you your own sonic brain training s rank certificate our first category is cancelled games two games were uncovered this year that have never been seen before first we have a scrapped isometric puzzle game called treasure tales the pitch for which sega technical institute artist craig stitt worked on making these mock-up stills in 1993. the game was very recently unearthed being rediscovered by a stitt on a vhs resume from 1995. by the sounds of it treasure tales never made it much further than the drawing board but the mock-ups that we have look pretty interesting in my opinion tails's sprite looks like it's from sonic 2 but how about the backgrounds are these assets from another pre-existing game i don't know but the whole thing reminds me of bart's nightmare the other cancelled game we've learnt about this year is called astropede what the heck is that you may be thinking well astropede started life as sega peed and got a little further than treasure tales in the development life cycle in the early 1990s sega of america made a demo mock-up of the game it was intended to be a game set in the sonic universe with astropede's antagonist being a dr robotnik creation for those eagle-eyed viewers you'll also notice that this demo features the cut hidden palace zone from sonic the hedgehog 2 along with the master emerald in all its glory this demo is seemingly all we have of astroped though the rediscovery of these two games was pretty big news in the sonic community this year and the truth is there's a boatload of cancelled sonic games or rather games that were referenced once in a gaming magazine never materialized in my eyes there's only two other cancelled games that stand out as worthy of discussion first of all sonic mars sonic mars is a predecessor to the much more well-known sonic xtreme which was also cancelled it was in development for the sega 32x where the dev team flirted with a 3d sonic engine for the first time when yuji naka one of the main men behind sonic the hedgehog saw the pitch demo his apparent response was good luck sonic mars was another one of those games that sought to integrate the saturday morning cartoon cast of sally acorn and co but that idea was dropped when sonic mars morphed into sonic xtreme before being binned altogether another scrapped sonic game worth noting is sonic ds an early nintendo ds build of a very basic looking game where you tap the screen to make sonic run the game was abandoned and gave way to sonic rush seeing as these are all cancelled games they can't really qualify as the most obscure game ever but we can get more obscure anyway let's move on the second category involves me introducing you to the sega terra drive i'm sure you've all heard of the sega cd and the 32x well the japanese exclusive terra drive was the result of a partnership between sega and ibm to create a device that doubled as a personal computer and a mega drive the terra drive had one game in its library that utilized both the computer and the mega drive part of the terra drive's hardware and that game was puzzle construction there isn't a huge amount of information about this baby online but it seems like a top-down puzzle game in the same vein as tetris or columns it featured a level editor utilizing the pc hardware while playing the actual game use the mega drive what is so sonicy about all of this i hear you say well for starters the menus feature some cool little bits of sonic art but also one of the games that can be played game number two is a sonic themed puzzle game reminiscent of columns this is actually a bigger deal than it sounds in the game you have to match up rows of blue sonics red sonics and yellow sonics sound familiar although it plays very differently it's visually similar to the infamous cancelled arcade game sega sonic bros which also features the different coloured sonics any lovers of that game will be happy to hear that sonic siblings made it onto home consoles in 1991 a year before their failed arcade adventure making them a canon maybe who knows sega sonic bros plays in a very convoluted fashion you basically have to create a perimeter of similarly coloured sonics kind of like in hexic to get rid of all of the innards in contrast puzzle construction follows a much more simple formula where you simply have to line up similarly coloured sonics i don't know if puzzle construction can technically be counted as a sonic game but if it can it's got to be one of the more obscure out there these screenshots and video clips were grabbed from armadillo i believe armadillo was the first person to find and showcase the sonic aspect of puzzle construction online thanks for documenting this game there's links to more raw gameplay footage on their youtube channel in the description of this video you'll also find a link to their twitter account too for what it's worth only 500 to 1000 tera drives were actually produced and puzzle construction hasn't yet been emulated so yeah it's pretty obscure by the way the thumbnail to this video was taken from a rom that was played in japanese game stalls to advertise the rotational capabilities of the terra drive it features madonna a scrapped character who appears in early sonic the hedgehog artwork neat if puzzle construction doesn't count because it's not very sonicy then let's move on to the third category mobile games for some discerning video game fans mobile games barely counters games but sonic has a long and very obscure history on mobile devices modern sonic mobile games all seem pretty relevant and well known retooled older games like christian whiteheads sonic 1 and 2 ports along with stuff like sonic dash and sonic jump is all far too well known to be considered obscure we have to go back in time a little bit to 2011 for example in 2011 a short free platformer game called sonic freehand released in japan featuring a really cute looking hand-drawn style sonic running through green hill zone and taking on badniks it's probably the most dramatic visual deviation sega have ever made from the core sonic design and i love it and it's obscure i really wish that sega would revisit this visual style more for future games going back further in 2009 sonic unleashed received a mobile port that was a completely original 2d platformer game with pretty decent looking bespoke graphics and sound made by gameloft admittedly the game is kind of short and it plays very awkwardly because it's a mobile game but it's cool that it exists and it's pretty obscure in 2008 gameloft also made sonic at the olympic games for mobile which repurposed certain sonic advance sprites there's no mario featured here of course i'd say that this one's pretty obscure too for some real hidden gems we have to jump back one more generation to when java ruled the mobile roost and sega were pumping out games like nobody's business via the sonic cafe the summit cafe wasn't a physical location it was a service active in japan between 2001 to 2007. for a fee mobile phone owners could join download and play a whole host of sega games including a metric ton of sonic games if i talked about all of these games individually this video would be hours long but i'd say that most of these games are pretty darn obscure there are of course sports games you've got sonic cricket sonic tennis sonic fishing sonic billiards and plenty of sonic golf games golf games are always fun and they work well even on the most primitive devices so i'm not surprised there were so many there's a handful of racing games too sonic racing cart is a top-down racing game that reminds me of micro machines while sonic cart 3dx is more akin to a mario kart game and there's stuff like card games and puzzle games there's so many of them most of these games look pretty basic and are pretty bare bones they're just normal card games but with a few sonic assets thrown into the mix interestingly shadow dr eggman tails and amy all had their own mobile titles has anyone ever played shadow shoot i think of all these games that one sounds the most interesting it's like a 2d endless runner game with a shooting component in 100 honesty none of the sonic cafe offerings look particularly enthralling except perhaps nakayoshi chow or good friend chow a very basic tamagotchi style game where you look after chow now i've not played this myself but this sort of thing seems like a no-brainer for mobile it fits the format perfectly and i'm shocked that further mobile chao installments didn't materialize there is also an incredibly primitive version of the original sonic the hedgehog ported over to mobile surely the most obscure port of that particular game there are just so many of these mobile games it's impossible to choose just one of them as a candidate for the most obscure sonic game of all time but in our hunt for obscurity we can go one step further back into the past to the earliest days of mobile gaming back in the year 2000 sun microsystems held the third java 1 conference where a deal between motorola and sega was announced stating sega would develop games for motorola's j2me powered handsets mobile magazines from around the time chronicle the four earliest sonic mobile games that were announced as part of this partnership sonic logic sonic's bomb squad sonic head-on and sonic j it's been assumed that sonic j stands for sonic java and looks like a very primitive black and white predecessor to the later full-color mobile port of sonic the hedgehog that we've just discussed of the four games it's the only one where non-magazine screenshots of the game exist courtesy of sonic retro 4 remember biggest sonic fan as for the other three games they're lost in the sands of time without a trace it's entirely possible that these games were in fact never released i'd put forward that these are the most obscure sonic games of all time by a wide margin unless there's someone out there with a two decades old phone who might have these games installed i doubt we'll ever get any more information about them a theory that i personally have is that these games were perhaps never released but retooled and repurposed into other games you can see on the sonic cafe website that sega released a mobile game titled head-on in 2001 suggesting that sonic head-on might have been sonic's unsoniced if that makes sense as for sonic logic and sonic's bomb squad well who knows they could have been retooled into later sonic cafe games they could have been scrapped or they could well have been released and could be lying dormant on somebody's phone somewhere this crop of sonic games is so obscure that no video evidence of their existence can be found on the internet so obscure that nobody knows if games like sonic's bomb squad was even released or not if by any chance you happen to have an old motorola phone rotting away in your garage why not turn it on and just see if you were the proud owner of sonic's bomb squad then you can upload a video of yourself playing it and make sonic history before we end here's a little extra mobile bonus for you all circa 2010 electronics company samsung were pre-packaging a game called jump boy on their mobile phones it's one of those awkward to control mobile puzzle platformer games pre-packaged one would assume the game got the stamp of approval by samsung but playing the game reveals a blatant act of theft listen to the game's background music for just one second [Music] yes this is an unauthorized use of chemical plant zones music how did this get through and that's my brain completely done all obscure sonic information deposited onto youtube if i've missed anything out let me know in the comments and with that i'm off to tend to my chow garden

Channel: Johnny Vector

Views: 41,123

Rating: 4.975419 out of 5

Keywords: sonic, sonic the hedgehog, obscure sonic, obscure sonic games, sonic obscure, lost sonic games, cancelled sonic games, forgotten sonic, cybershell, cybershell sonic, cybershell is back, cybershell obscure, cybershell sonic obscure, sega teradrive, teradrive, segapede, astropede, treasure tails, mobile sonic games, sonic mobile, chao garden, sonic java, sonic java games, sonic mobile games, sonic mars, sonic ds, puzzle construction, puzzle construction sonic, segasonic bros

Id: fJwRgbp8Mqs

Length: 14min 29sec (869 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020