The Sonic Game We Never Got 

Sega Technical Institute has one of the most unfortunate acronyms ever

Sonic was so fast on this game, it broke reality and manage to not exist.

I am one of those convinced that X-Treme's spirit lives on in Lost World which is why I too like this game so much. It's wacky but fun once people give it a try. Also I once played a X-Treme PC fangame that actually felt pretty accurate which I ever since couldn't find anymore.

My friend's father was an artist who worked on Sonic Extreme. In the fourth grade I was lucky enough to be invited to visit Sega of America's "Take your kid to work day." My friend's father showed us two enemies he was working on for the game. The first was a short, one wheeled robot that tossed a spiked ball into the air. The second was a bowling pin shaped mummy. My friend's dad let his son and I vote on which version of the mummy he would put into the game. The first skinned version had its eyes peeking out of the top of the bowling pin where a typical head would be. The second skin had bigger eyes on the mid section of the bowling pin shaped body where the stomach would be. The best part was the animation. The sarcophagus would open revealing the mummy. inside the door was a roll of toilet paper. The bowling pin shaped mummy would then waddle out of the sarcophagus. Of course, being 10 year old boys, My friend and I picked the mummy with the toilet paper roll on the inside of its sarcophagus door. I also got to go on a tour of Sega. A highlight of the tour was when we were led to room that had a ton of swanky wood panels and nice seating. On the wall was a large screen (projector?) they dimmed the lights and they showed us a game for the sega saturn called "Nights." The other memory that sticks out was that Sega was housed in two buildings. The Second building held the game testers. The testers showed us a tank game of some sort (it was first person. I can't remember the name). The second building had a sega gift shop with t-shirts and swag for sale and an Arcade. All the arcades were on free-to-play mode so I got to play virtual cop with two guns (my parents would never give me two bucks to play an arcade game. Basically it was 10 year old Sega fan boy heaven for me). If any one else worked at sega or was a kid who got to go to sega back in the 90's please post your story! If there was drama at Sega during the time I took my tour, I never would have known. Thank you to the staff at Sega for putting together such a wonderful tour and experience for the kids in the 90's - That tour was the Highlight of my youth.

you see "dedication" i see "imprisonment and torture"

You have to do a video talking about the stuff this game was going to have like stories, characters, enemies, levels. I can already see the video name. “ Lost Lost Bits of Sonic X-tream “

The game had so much potential! They could have not shown it to the public and then took another 1 year to make it, and then in the mean while to keep fans waiting, they just port 3D blast to the Saturn and keep development going. If you want to play some of the game on unity, there is a fan game that’s called “Sonic X-treme Unity” and its a good rebuild of the game using unity! It was even in this years Sage so if you want to “play” this game, I recommend going to download that game!

20 hours a day? Living in the office? That's not dedication, that's paid slavery.

I'm glad that SXU exists . We can finally play this game when it is finished.

You know, there is a fan game called Sonic Robo Blast 2 that used the Sonic’s sprites from Sonic Xtreme for some of their beta builds.

Oh my god I asked you to cover this game during one of your streams I have crapped myself because I never expected you to actually do it This video is like some form of dream come true in a literal sense, and it makes me happy that you actually covered it because nobody's actually been paying that much attention to the game in recent years, and this is one of my most favorite unreleased Sonic games, since it was supposed to be the rival to Super Mario 64, being Sonic's first fully fledged 3D game. By the way, I'd definitely love with all my heart to see you look at the prototype (and even possibly the level editor or even the website you mentioned here) in full depth, kind of like what you did with those Nintendo 64 Tech Demos you showed. It would make me even happier than the word itself could ever even describe to see you do it. and one more thing - In one edition of Nights Into Dreams, specifically the Christmas Version, had an actual Sonic level where you played as the blue blur himself, and even fought Robotnik at the end. it was sorta like what Sonic X-Treme was considered to be, a 2.5D level. the level might have been a reused idea (or even the leftovers) from when they were using the NIGHTS tools to make Sonic X-Treme.

To be fair having an institute named S.T.I probably wasn’t a good idea either.

What if someone had a time machine and made all canceled games not be canceled like saving the production team Man I’m bored

For those interested, someone called Miiyouandmii2 did a 3 part series on Sonic X-Treme that goes into much more detail. I seriously reccomend it.

I'm a former game tester and you bet I'd love to see more of the prototypes

I feel so sorry for the people who worked so hard on this game. They have my blessings for doing their best on what they could work with.

I mean we got Sonic Robo Blast 2(its an fan-game)

Nice vid as always :)

I also heard there was originally gonna be a movie that uses this game. The plot of the movie is is sonic comes out of the game and the boy playing the game seem sonic and they try to do things to bring sonic back inside the tv. This sounds like a imaginable movie.

8:05 Oh you thought you could slip GRAND DAD past me?

Hmmm the gravity seams USED!?! Oh, I get it. Sonic lost world

STI is an unfortunate acronym for a company...

Ten bucks says this guy just found out about Sonic Xtreme, while we all knew about it for years...

Cover the prototypes please! :)

The gameplay in this looks like a Scratch project. XD

yes sonic need more videos on this channel.

Rumors say that the game is still being worked on to this day.

5:30 Korean map

I feel as if a main problem for Sega is that they don’t allow themselves to delay a game which is why 06 failed

The person that created the boss engine of Sonic Xtreme is Christina coffin

This video is xtreme

Its a shame, too. Seemed to hold a lot of potential.

Cyberpunks one wasnt even crunch it was just overtime

Maybe a fan will make HD remake someday

Sonic X-Treme was too X-treme to be finished

Sonic 32x is like sonic Robo blast 2

3:24 explain what I'm looking at Also, that movie plot sounds similar to the Sonic movie we got

They should have just made a 2d sonic for Saturn like klonoa 2.5D or pandemonium

They should go back to this and put it on switch kinda like sonic mania

3:25 That's FREAKY

That's not dedication. That's bad management.

I feel like some talented people could bring this game from a trashed pile of game design failure to a really well made fangame.

Sonic x-tream or extreme

cool video

Sonic 3D blast was decent 8/10 game.

If they never said they were gonna cancel it, that means that they could just drop the game if they wanted to, right? I know it sounds crazy, but they could use engines of nowadays and retake the project... Imagine Sega in the next E3 saying "remember that demo about Sonic Extreme? Well we finished it and will be releasing it on PS5, Nintendo Switch and Xbox Series X next month"

Sega Transmitted Infection

Kind of sad honestly; hate hearing about how hard devs worked on a game only for it to get canned. We as consumers don't understand the lengths that some teams have to go just to get games out there. RIP

Fun Fact: This game was remade into a new fan-game called Sonic Robo Blast.

It looks better than half of PS1 games tbh

Why is the video called “the sonic game that never got”

One minor correction: the thing that really killed the game was that it’s lead programmer for the boss engine that the game was now built around, Christina Coffin, came down with severe pneumonia in the final stretch of development, basically ensuring it would miss the deadline. That’s essentially what made Mike Wallace to tell SEGA the game wouldn’t be out on time and led to its cancellation

What irked me about Sonic X-Treme was it's essentially a third Bug! game, but using a fish eye lens, Sonic's even an unlockable character in Bug!

This game wasn't cancelled! Sonic was running so fast that he accidentally moved the release date to 3095.

"The sonic game we never got" which one lol

I cant believe someone almost died developing this game. That's dedication.

8:05 Don't think I didn't notice the music transition into the first few notes of Meet the Flintstones before cutting off.

Can you imagine working so hard on a Sonic game that a doctor tells you you only have 6 months to live. That guy probably had nightmares about Sonic

Sonic Xtreme had some potential, especially with the side scrolling rotation design.

I guess some games just never see the light of day...

i heard someone is working to recreate parts of it.

Yuji Naka was kind of a brat about the code. He made it on SEGA's time, so it wasn't his to exclusively use.

Chris Senn is a poor soul he nearly killed hinself thank's to this game, and years latter he had his chance with another Sonic game... The Game: Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric

I was just researching about Sonic Xtreme. Development was a really interesting topic, and the game looked really neat

Thank god Sega announced recently that they were gonna be more lenient with time when developing games. I mean, damn- what if that lad actually died

“Do you know how little that narrows it down?”.jpeg

The Sonic Mars mockup footage is fascinating if you haven't seen it, though it was never actually implemented.

Please make a lost bits about the prototypes.

Project Sonic Xtreme Unity is actually trying to recreate the game accurately and it looks great!

You heard it by the first comment, it's approved by a turle

The Game Was Too X-treme for this world

These are all very neat, but it seems that there’s no mention of POV, which was a third party company that was supposed to help with the development of Sonic X-Treme by porting the PC version to the Saturn. They even made an entire prototype that tried to save the project, but I think this was very late in development and didn’t survive for long.

I usually find scrapped or unreleased games really interesting and want to play them but this one looked like such a headache to play. Simple jumps are clearly hard to pull off if you don't eye ball it correctly. I'm not in love with modern sonic but they clearly went in a better direction as far a game play physics

How about the most obscure sonic game we never got, the one based on sonic SATAM. It had running and stealth sections as well as most of the SATAM character returning? :D

I couldn't afford a superchat during the stream, but you earned a cool exile point for being epic. It was fun tetra!

That was a very douchy move by Yuji Naka and it proved that he was more ego than willing to help out.

No, Sonic Xtreme was actually a 3D port of the Sonic Tiger Game all along, it was just canceled because they realized how shitty Tiger was and their games

Fun fact: there was a canceled sonic movie around sonic x-treme in development before being canceled

This game looked like it had alot of potential

can you cover more lost bits about console prototype like newer ones like wii or nintendo switch lost bits 😉😉 even wii u or 3ds last time you did was a gamecube and n64

Approved by a turtle.

Does anyone remember back in the day when YuriOfWind made a Gaming Mysteries on this game? For real though, it's so bizarre to think of how much lost media has grown in interest over the past couple of years. Unreleased games and other such media have always been a passion of mine, and it's heartwarming to see more people sharing that passion. Also, I would love to see the sort of fish-eye style gameplay reinvented in another game, especially a Sonic one. I doubt Sega would bless us with a Star Fox 2 scenario since this game literally does not exist, but hey, I'm all for something that plays like this!!

Got to love how sega cancels this but still decides elise kissing sonic was a good idea. At least they care about their fans

Fun fact: A build close enough to what you see in those trailers where the game looks somewhat complete and playable has been shown off in a way. It's the level editor and it has a built in test mode, it's almost like the trailers but the downside is that it only runs on Windows 95. The guy that owns it apparently wanted to try and port it to modern Windows but that would be hard to do since he doesn't have the source code.

As you said, there were hardware limitations and that's essentially the major reason why they couldn't achieve the potential they wanted at the time. I could talk about the failure of the Saturn all day but my point is that Sonic Xtreme is a concept they could've still made when the Dreamcast existed. Some ideas just require more creativity and horsepower to get the job done but SEGA unfortunately didn't take enough time to realize that. They literally wasted more money and time pushing out consoles that became obsolete, while competing with others, and assuring they're still releasing games to a growing market. What they should do is reproduce it or conjoin it with another game so it's not totally lost in history forever.

This video left out so many details, I'm disappointed.

SEGA really hated making money, didn't they. Pride was their downfall.

It's kinda odd that since Sonic 3D blast had a great visual appearance, that another Sonic game couldn't have been made on the x32 or Saturn. But in some ways maybe it was for the best, because Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast was a great experience that prolly wouldn't have been the same on earlier hardware.

The hell that the Sonic Xtreme developers went through sounds even WORSE than the hell that Sonic fans go through with Sonic games in general, I didn't even think that was possible

Thanks for reminding me that instead of watching Star Wars Death Star explosions clips I can just rewind with tetra bit gaming

Please talk about the leaked prototypes! This game is already one big lost bit

Epic video bro :D!!!

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I like how some people have tried recreating the prototype levels of X-Treme in Sonic Robo Blast 2, given their similar aesthetics

One month ago I was thinking to myself: "Someone should make an entire video about Sonic Xtreme in english", since the best one I knew was in portuguese (and not everyone can understand that). I also thought: "Since Cybershell almost never uploads, TetraBitGaming would be a good fit for the video." Anyways, thanks for fulfilling my thoughts, I guess? Kkkk

I feel like this game would have helped the Saturn😔

Seems like this is a new Mystery Bit right now.

imagine this christmas or next year sega have a livestream to introduce new games and it was sonic X-treme

Another excellent video! I've heard about this before, but I love another fresh spin in things. Man, I really had high hopes for this game as a child. One of the reasons I never bought a Sega Saturn new. At some point I briefly owned what was an affordable used Saturn from Funcoland, but the system was in serious need of some blue spinning love.

1:04 Bubsy: What Could Pawssibly go wrong.