Whatever Happened To: Sonic Crackers
Sonic and Tails had always seemed like an inseparable duo, but not quite in the way that Sega envisioned in this experimental platform game engine test…
Nick digs up the dirt on this failed Mega Drive release
It shouldn’t be a surprise that Sega was planning to saturate the market with Sonic games at its mid-nineties peak. Following the release of Sonic 3 in 1994, three major Sonic projects were in development internally at Sega. Sonic & Knuckles was late in production with the main Japanese team at Sega Technical Institute. The American team at Sega Technical Institute had just had its ‘Sonic Mars’ design document for a 32X Sonic game approved, which would ultimately evolve into the ill-fated Saturn project Sonic X-treme. Lastly, over in Japan, a third team was working on a Mega Drive game known internally as Sonic Stadium, which at some point was also known as Sonic Crackers.
It’s fair to say that the Sonic Crackers team was not the one expected to deliver the biggest hit. Other than producer Makoto Oshitani, who had served as one of the directors on Sonic CD, only a small group of artists had worked on any previous Sonic CD, but most of the staff were new to the series. Given the early nature of the work seen here, it’s entirely possible that none of the Sonic CD artists had even had much involvement at this point. This team of newcomers came up with a bold spin on the existing Sonic formula. While the game featured Sonic and Tails in the 2D platform environments to which they had become accustomed, they now each held a ring. These two rings were joined by a string of sparkly stars that acted like an elastic band – by building tension you could achieve high speeds or giant leaps, in a system built for co-op play. The game was shown to the press under strict secrecy, before disappearing from the radar.
A prototype ROM of Sonic Crackers was released by the Belgian group
Evil Empire in June 1995. The leaked ROM has conflicting dates, with the title screen suggesting April 1994 and the ROM header stating July 1994. At this point, the game was little more than an engine test, featuring two side-scrolling levels. One is an industrial-themed stage with a variety of different colour palettes, with a level design that sees Sonic and Tails working from left to right and back again as they ascend towards the top of the stage. If you reach the destination or three minutes pass, you’ll reach a top-down area set in
the sky. There’s nothing to do here and no collision, but by pausing and pressing A you’ll move to the second side-scrolling stage, a brightly coloured funfair-style stage against a night sky background. This stage features incredibly broken collision and a neat exterior loop. Once a minute passes, you’ll move to a dark, industrial style overhead stage, the last of the game’s unique stages.
Ultimately, Sonic Crackers moved to the 32X, filling the void left by moving Sonic Mars to the Saturn. By the time it was back on the radar, the concept had been revamped heavily into a spin-off starring Knuckles with a preliminary title of Knuckles’ Ring Star. All of the existing art from the Mega Drive version was dropped, the overhead game sections were canned completely, and Sonic and
Tails were also given a break. Instead, they were replaced by Knuckles and a ragtag band of companions including Vector, a crocodile left over from the design process of the original Sonic game, and Mighty, the armadillo character from the isometric arcade game Segasonic The Hedgehog. By the time the game was finished and released as Knuckles’ Chaotix, all that was left of Sonic Crackers was the elastic Combi-ring mechanic and some music.
Its authenticity has been disputed, but a number of corroborating sources suggest that the leaked prototype is indeed legitimate. These include the text ‘Soniccrackerss32x’ found in a Knuckles’ Chaotix prototype ROM, as well as mentions of Sonic Stadium in the design document for Sonic Mars and in a November 1995 article on cancelled Sonic games in Sega Power. Most significantly, additional overhead sprites for Tails were also found in a Yu Yu Hakusho prototype ROM, serving as the only concrete indication of what happened between the leaked prototype and a December 1994 prototype of Chaotix. These sprites depict a number of Tails’ actions including grabbing, throwing, being dizzy, spin-dashing and even a victory pose.
Ultimately, it’s probably for the best that Sonic Crackers ended up taking the turn it did. The Mega
Drive scarcely needed another Sonic platform game in 1995 after the double hit of Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles in 1994, while the 32X desperately needed some star power. Knuckles isn’t a match for Sonic in that department, but he was riding a wave of popularity at the time and the experimental game design was certainly far better-suited to a spin-off. There wasn’t much worth salvaging in the Sonic Crackers prototype, and the development team correctly identified that the music was the material of value. While we’d love to see how far it got before the concept and platform changed, we’re not losing any sleep over Sonic Crackers.
“It’s probably for the best that Sonic Crackers ended up taking the turn it did”