Thanks to the guys at Sonic Retro, a build of Sonic Xtreme by Point of View has been released. There is not much known about this build besides the FAQ that was put together by Chris Senn. During the middle of Sonic Xtreme’s development, SEGA outsourced the development of the game to Point of View Studios without the knowledge of the technical lead, Ofer Alon.
The company “used assets from the original effort and developed a level converter to convert Sega Technical Institute’s engine levels into the binary format used by POV’s own engine, which had already been used before for several other games on a variety of platforms, such as Saturn, Playstation, Nintendo 64, PC.” You can check out the build in the video above, and you can let us know what you think in the comments below!
[via Sonic Retro]
damn this actually looks interesting! whenever I think of sonic extreme I think of the fact that the saturn was not designed to do heavy 3d games. When Yuji Naka saw the early builds of this game he wanted to distance himself from it as much as possible. while other game designers like Miyamoto were given complete control over their created characters, Naka was not. intact he even wanted to quit sega after sonic 1 but SOA President Kalinske convinced him to stay. Sega of japan had problems dealing with their creative game designers and programmers thats why STI was founded in america to make Sega more competitive… but I fee the failure of sonic extreme really put a nail in the coffin to American led sega game development.
Sonic Extreme had so many things working against it.
1. poor hardware for a 3d sonic game.
2. an unrealistic release date and development schedule.
3. poor management and support from sega.
4. and an overall lack of knowledge of how a 3d sonic game would function.
Its no wonder Naka choose to work on nights into dreams and Burning Rangers. In those projects he could still have creative freedom within sega and build games that required medium amounts of budget effort and resources while still developing outstanding titles.
This revived build of Sonic extreme is an amazing effort and some of its features (like moving into the foreground) are impressive. but overall I feel it shows that the project could not be saved and was far below what the competition offered. The fact that they could get this to run on a saturn is a real achievement to gaming history.
Thanks for Sharing this Seganerds!!!!
you’re welcome!
Your going way over the top with him wanting to quit…
Nakayama simply wanted to release games quickly…
Him threatening to quit came much later, he did however relocate to America to distance himself from Nakayama. That said, he had a great relationship with him they worked together on NiGHTS which was given the development time that he wanted.
I don’t really care for builds of Sonic X-Treme especially since the actual game was much further in development compared to the early builds that keep coming out… People seem to fret so damn much over these prototypes and they are all primitive.
The game had half a dozen more features then simply Sonic levels, the Sonic levels weren’t really that much of a problem. The Saturn library have a ton of games that are 3D and much more better looking than Sonic X-Treme… Even Sonic R looks and plays better than these silly prototypes.
Sonic X-Treme was set to have 4 playable characters with completely unique gameplay characteristics… I’m not going to list them. Google it.
If you want to see what a fully realized version of Sonic X-Treme Sonic levels would have been like than Sonic Lost World’s is a decent game to check out…
Regardless, it’s still a cool piece of history!
There is a little more game play in this video from 1995
https://youtu.be/4NdGayuC3Ak?t=1171
my inner child is still like “omg omg omg!”