Sonic Mars was being developed by Sega Technical Institute (STI), a U.S.-based developer that had worked on games such as Sonic 2, Sonic 3 , Sonic Spinball, The Ooze and Comix Zone. In its earliest conception, the game was set to be released on the Sega Genesis and later on the 32X, under the name Sonic Mars (based on the codename for the 32X, Sega Mars). Sonic Mars would also have featured Sally Acorn and the other Freedom Fighters from the Saturday morning animated series, Sonic the Hedgehog. Part of the project staff included Chris Senn, who designed demo animations in order to persuade executives, and Michael Kosaka, who was the staff leader and the game’s producer.
However, that project was eventually shifted: it was decided that the game would require much more powerful hardware to cope with the new engine, and for commercial reasons, Kosaka’s departure from Sega and the eventual commercial failure of the 32X, the release of a Sonic game on the upcoming Sega Saturn console was necessary. [Info from Wikipedia]
You can download the original script for Sonic Mars @ Sonic-Cult
Images:
Videos:
What do you think about this unseen game? Give your vote!
(10 votes, average: 4.10 out of 5)
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really nice finds looks like they wanted lots of minigames
If that was the gameplay… Well, it’d be like Sonic the Hedgehog (original).
Seriously, Sonic is about being as quick as possible, in this game…hell, even Mario is faster.
I did a writeup for this game over at sonicretro.org. That’s where all of these images come from. The game was gonna focus on that SatAM cartoon series and had cameos from the characters and some of them were playable also.
It WASN’T X-treme. Sonic X-treme was Always a Saturn game, however, there were a number of ideas for different Sonic games.. bits were taken and ended up in X-treme. It’s normal pratice. Simply a case that after 1 Sonic game project was canned, the team were free to work on another project etc. But as X-treme, it was ONLY EVER Saturn… boy this simple mistakes are what make us Researchers have a hell of a time..
You are right Manic Man, the Wikipedia article was not precise, sometime we just indicate all the “Unreleased STI Sonic Projects” as “X-treme” because it’s the better know one as it was the last project in the “unreleased STI projets serie”. Thanks for point that out, I’ll fix the description :)
Looks pretty cool, they used every ounce of the 32X’s power, however it looks way too slow to be any fun.
L’hardware del 32x poteva comunque fare molto di più. Basta vedere la demo (anche su you tube) realizzata nel 1995 dal team Scavenger per capire che il 32x era ancora tutto da sfruttare. Ma quel video si riferisce davvero a Sonic Mars? In effetti vista la grafica credo di si.
Il video è un concept fatto i quegli anni se non sbaglio, non girava su 32X direttamente per quanto ne so, era solamente un’idea di come fare il gioco :)
In effetti era una sorta di demo tecnica però girava su un 32x liscio senza modifiche (era su cartuccia ovviamente)
The pitch demo was NOT ACTUAL GAMEPLAY! It was actually a recreation.