Sonic 3 and Knuckles and McDonald's and Profit Margins

Greetings. Today I'll be blabbing about a cool game I like. I like a lot of games so there's a good few I want to talk about like this in the future. This is a long one so let's get right into it.

Sonic 3 & Knuckles

When I was growing up, YouTube and retro game nostalgia was starting to boom. As a bright eyed little child, I explored the internet and learned that games like Supers Mario 64 and Mega Mans was really cool. The people uploading let's plays were probably doing it for themselves or for others who had that nostalgia for those games, but I was silently sitting there on my Windows Vista absorbing all the knowledge and passion like a sponge, shaping my taste in art for the rest of my life.*sheds a tear of ???*

Sonic 3 & Knuckles was one of those games that I heard lots of praise about from lots of people (or maybe it was mostly just ClementJ642, but I digress).

I was first able to play the game on Sonic Mega Collection for the GameCube. For some reason, Sonic 3 & Knuckles is locked when you first get it. In real life, you have to connect a cartridge of Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles together to play this wonderful adventure in full. Their way of replicating this was... making you play each game individually 20 times each. So I had to sit there and waste 20 minutes opening and closing each game 20 times. I mean, I was a kid so I had the time to waste, but it's just bizarre to me they would ever make you do that.

Anyways, I played this game like crazy as a kid. I would fill up all eight save slots with 100% save files. First on GameCube, then on the DS, and then on a real Genesis when I got one. I knew all the weird secrets, glitches, and tricks thanks to spending countless hours watching people play on YouTube. These videos in particular gave me hours of amusement (the text used to be in annotations, but now they're in the form of closed captions). At this point it's weird for me to imagine not understanding some of the confusing mechanics and level design, but this game definitely has its rough edges.

Sonic 3 started out as an isometric game using some proprietary chip SEGA was developing, much like Nintendo's Super FX chip. That chip got canned, their plans were ruined, so they started from scratch making a more traditional sequel in early-mid 1993. Unfortunately, SEGA came in with a McDonald's tie in for February of 1994. This meant they had until November to finish the game (as it takes time to manufacture the games too). 

The developers were ambitious and had a lot of ideas, and didn't want them to go to waste or be rushed, so they cut Sonic 3 down to six zones and were able to put the rest in Sonic & Knuckles released in October. Sonic & Knuckles had a special slot so it could connect to Sonic 3, and you could play the whole adventure as Sonic 3 & Knuckles!  

 

A few years ago a prototype from a month and a half before the game was shipped got dumped online. It's astounding to see that literally nothing is finished. There's finished art, almost complete music, some levels implemented, but so much of it is almost unrecognizable to the final product. Back in the 80s and early 90s games had such a quick turnaround time, even the best of the best. Crunch and business aside, it just didn't take as long to make games, and a lot of great games were developed in a year or so. Makes me wonder what this game would be like if it had another 6 months and better working conditions.

 

Besides the great music, graphics, and gameplay, there are a couple of small design decisions that I think about a lot that I wanna talk about.

Sonic 3 has a fairly simple story, but the game makes some effort to involve it in the gameplay unlike most other games from the time. This game introduces Knuckles and he shows a lot of character and development without any textboxes or dialogue. There are also transitions between each level that make the island you're exploring feel like some kind of physical place. None of this directly enhances the gameplay, but it makes the game feel a lot more exciting and satisfying. Games would soon move on to video cutscenes and lots of text so it's cool to see this game pull things off so well.

The game also has different paths for different characters, and handles it the best out of any game I've seen. When you're playing as Sonic you'll see a couple rocks blocking what seems like another route. You can't break them because they're elevated off the ground and you can't spindash into them. You have to continue upwards to beat the level.

When you play through the game as Knuckles, you find that he can break boulders by just touching them! If you try to go up Sonic's route, you'll find that due to Knuckles' lower jump height he can't reach that upper route, so you have to continue down the lower path. These different routes are created incidentally by the level design and the character's traits rather than a scripted scene or anything like that. It's a really smart way to handle this kind of thing and I'm surprised I haven't seen it more.

Despite being made in less than a year, this game has a lot of great polish that covers up some of the weird bugginess pretty well. If you like retro platformers definitely check this one out! Just don't be afraid to read a guide to understand some of the confusing parts.

Welp that's about it! I didn't go into much detail about gameplay or levels but I'm sure there's a lot of video essays you can find to fill your brain up. OR you could go and play the game yourself and discover all this stuff! I'm not a big fan of the Sonic Origins collection, but it's fine enough. Sonic 3 A.I.R. is a great fanmade option that lets you play in widescreen, although it has been made much more difficult since SEGA delisted the Sonic 3 & Knuckles rom from Steam. Good luck with your gaming or whatever, I gotta get busy makin' my own! Next week I'll talk about one of my finished games.

🐒See you next post!🐒