Hello everyone! It’s that special time of the year again, where we celebrate the holidays with yet another yuletide collection of prototypes. Apparently, we weren’t very well behaved this year because Santa decided to drop off a couple of stinkers down the chimney! Keeping with the holiday spirit, we can think of no better way to spread the holiday cheer than by sharing our Christmas load with the lot of you. May God have mercy on all of your mortal souls!
Courtesy of our friends at Last Minute Continue, we present the E3 prototype of Shadow the Hedgehog for the Nintendo GameCube! Aside from some other goodies, we have a proper dump of “Beta 4” of Shadow the Hedgehog as well! Ow the edge!
In all seriousness, we know this one has been a long time coming. Circumstances that were a little out of our control and the rabbit hole we ended up falling into led us down the path to really take our time with this one. We hope the wait was worth it. The story that led to the ultimate preservation of this prototype and the others that were offered to us is an extremely long one that has (un)fortunately brought us to today. Yes, it’s going to be one of those articles, so sit tight, grab a hot chocolate and a semi-automatic rifle, and enjoy the look back at one of the more bizarre moments in Sonic Team history.
It’s difficult to decide what to think of Sonic the Hedgehog these days. You could make an argument that Sonic games have been less than stellar longer than there have been momentous successes. He’s been around for a while; over the course of over thirty years, he has over 100 titles under his belt. Like any other character that has been around for that long, inevitably, Sonic games would eventually see some misses. That’s not to say that Sonic was unfamiliar with failure even during a time when he was at his most popular, but there’s definitely at least some consensus as to when the series noticeably took a downturn for the worse.
That fateful day in January of 2001, when Sega would announce its plans to go third-party, would be a very big turning point for the company brand. When Sega had the Dreamcast, they had their own playground to do what they pleased and to have full control over the kind of experiences they wanted to offer to their audience. When Sega became a third-party company, choosing to publish and develop titles for other hardware manufacturers rather than create hardware to self-publish on, they were no longer in the captain’s chair. They had to find themselves answering to a lot more people than they had before. Despite their promise to ensure that Sega’s capability of designing and publishing great software would be uncompromised going forward, as the years would pass, that promise would be underdelivered at best.
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