English Amiga Board - View Single Post - Sonic the Hedgehog C64

PortuguesePilot · 19 December 2021, 07:52

As the unfinished "Blaze" ( [ Show youtube player ]) game shows, technically a game "like" Sonic could be done on a plain A500 or at least on a typically 1MB expanded one. Sonic actually almost came to the Amiga and other contemporary 16bits at the time, courtesy of U.S. Gold (guess it wouldn't be very good, then, heh?) but SEGA actually realized what they had in their hands when they saw the pre-release version on the newly released Mega Drive hardware and immediately cancelled all the third-party negotiations regarding Sonic (and other games) as they - correctly - realized that the game would help sell consoles as a Mega Drive exclusive and they would make a lot more revenue that way than by selling the rights to some third-party company that would later sell the game to sloppy westerners and their weird, quirky and crappy desktop computers...

So the game was never released on the Amiga not because the Amiga "couldn't do it", but because of mere business acumen. Well, to be absolutely frank, the Amiga probably couldn't really do it like the Mega Drive did, given the absence of a chunky mode, so we'd probably end up with something more akin the Master System version of Sonic, which is not too shabby at all. More than probably, though, we'd end up with some travesty named Sonic, programmed by a couple of teens on some bedroom out in Preston, bearing a main character sort-of resembling Sonic, but devoid of all its qualities... you know, something like other SEGA tie-ins on the Amiga: Out-Run, Sonic Boom, Action Fighter or Thunderblade.

The aforementioned new remake for the Amiga is just adapted code. It's not made grounds up for the Amiga. I think it used mainly C and it's devoid of any 68k ASM. A true Sonic the Hedgehog made for Amiga should be almost entirely coded in low-level 68k ASM. Because of this - and the fact that 68k ASM is, by all accounts, a "dead language" and programming a game like Sonic the Hedgehog would not be a small feat - I suspect we'll never actually see a true Amiga version of Sonic the Hedgehog. Hell, even Keith Bugeja himself said someone could finish his amazing Blaze prototype but no-one picked it up, given the size and difficulty of the task at hand. Now imagine making a proper 16bit version of Sonic the Hedgehog for the Amiga in 68k ASM. Yep... probably not gonna happen, even discounting all the legal issues that might arise (even though SEGA isn't Nintendo and other Sonic fan-made games seem to exist fine without legal action). It's just too much work for too little (if any) pay. We're going to have to remain in the "what if" realm of imagination, I suspect.

19 December 2021, 07:52	#8
PortuguesePilot Global Moderator Join Date: May 2013 Location: Setúbal, Portugal Posts: 614	As the unfinished "Blaze" ( [ Show youtube player ]) game shows, technically a game "like" Sonic could be done on a plain A500 or at least on a typically 1MB expanded one. Sonic actually almost came to the Amiga and other contemporary 16bits at the time, courtesy of U.S. Gold (guess it wouldn't be very good, then, heh?) but SEGA actually realized what they had in their hands when they saw the pre-release version on the newly released Mega Drive hardware and immediately cancelled all the third-party negotiations regarding Sonic (and other games) as they - correctly - realized that the game would help sell consoles as a Mega Drive exclusive and they would make a lot more revenue that way than by selling the rights to some third-party company that would later sell the game to sloppy westerners and their weird, quirky and crappy desktop computers... So the game was never released on the Amiga not because the Amiga "couldn't do it", but because of mere business acumen. Well, to be absolutely frank, the Amiga probably couldn't really do it like the Mega Drive did, given the absence of a chunky mode, so we'd probably end up with something more akin the Master System version of Sonic, which is not too shabby at all. More than probably, though, we'd end up with some travesty named Sonic, programmed by a couple of teens on some bedroom out in Preston, bearing a main character sort-of resembling Sonic, but devoid of all its qualities... you know, something like other SEGA tie-ins on the Amiga: Out-Run, Sonic Boom, Action Fighter or Thunderblade. The aforementioned new remake for the Amiga is just adapted code. It's not made grounds up for the Amiga. I think it used mainly C and it's devoid of any 68k ASM. A true Sonic the Hedgehog made for Amiga should be almost entirely coded in low-level 68k ASM. Because of this - and the fact that 68k ASM is, by all accounts, a "dead language" and programming a game like Sonic the Hedgehog would not be a small feat - I suspect we'll never actually see a true Amiga version of Sonic the Hedgehog. Hell, even Keith Bugeja himself said someone could finish his amazing Blaze prototype but no-one picked it up, given the size and difficulty of the task at hand. Now imagine making a proper 16bit version of Sonic the Hedgehog for the Amiga in 68k ASM. Yep... probably not gonna happen, even discounting all the legal issues that might arise (even though SEGA isn't Nintendo and other Sonic fan-made games seem to exist fine without legal action). It's just too much work for too little (if any) pay. We're going to have to remain in the "what if" realm of imagination, I suspect. Last edited by PortuguesePilot; 19 December 2021 at 08:15.