Sega Technical Institute has one of the most unfortunate acronyms ever

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

"The sonic game we never got" which one lol

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

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.

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.

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.

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

i heard someone is working to recreate parts of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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!!

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

Please make a lost bits about the prototypes.

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

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

The Game Was Too X-treme for this world

This game looked like it had alot of potential

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

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 “

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.

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

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

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.

You know what would have been good? A classic Sonic came on the Saturn which was a fantastic machine for 2D sprite games. Could have had some awesome sprite scaling special stages between the most colourful and beautifully animated zones we’ve even seen. Oh well.

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

1:04 Bubsy: What Could Pawssibly go wrong.

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

Wow, imagine not letting people in your own company use your work. So much for team spirit...

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.

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

Seems like this is a new Mystery Bit right now.

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!

I feel awful for Chris Senn. Sonic X-Treme, Project S... Technically speaking, that's two projects that ended up being cancelled. The one time a Sonic game he worked on got released, and it ended up being Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric. Another game that got heavilly meddled with by executives, counting the disastrous decision to make a game that was meant to run on a next-gen console (and made with CryEngine 3), and not for a (more or less) beefed up Wii, which IMO sounds like it would've been close to a repeat of the earlier development nightmare.

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

"the sonic game that never came out " you have no idea how little that narrows it down

man, this game looks so fucking cool, like, i mean the blurry videos of it, the vids that show when youre talking looks just unfinished and sad and really buggy, i wanna live in the alternate universe where sonic x-treme was a complete success

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

Epic video bro :D!!!

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

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.

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.

8:05 fleenstones

I’ll never understand why Yuji Naka was so perturbed about the NiGHTS engine being used. He played a role in what could have potentially been the biggest game yet for his own character failing.

Kinda wish he mentioned that the saturn version of sonic 3d blast because it was pretty much the replacement for sonic x treme when it got cancelled in the holiday season of 1996, the special stages of that version where also used by the nights engine and were gonna be used to make another cancelled sonic game, called sonic pool.

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

Fun fact, the movie that was going to go with extreme was called “sonic the hedgehog wonder of the worlds” basicly the plot was that this kid was struggling with his parents divorce and then sonic came out of the game so as eggman. Sonic then gets captured by eggman and this kid gets op powers. Then at the end they was gonna do some sonic x ending crap.

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

A lost bit on "Night in the Woods" would be awesome, probably will never happen tho...

Wait, I'm confused. Wasn't it the boss engine programmer, Christine Coffin who nearly died because she developed pneumonia while working on this game and spending countless nights in an office with less-than-ideal conditions? That's the first time I'm hearing someone attribute that to Chris Senn.

I feel like this game would have helped the Saturn😔

Aww, for a moment I thought you would talk about Sonic 3's original 3D rendition. I guess information on that is relatively scarce compared to the wealth of straight up development documentation dumped out by Senn years back.

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

"What can go wrong?" Oh you know, only the everything

We need a Rayman 2 lost bits Please tetra, if you are reading this don’t leave my plumboi behind

Another reason the Sonic Xtreme movie (Sonic the Hedgehog: wonders of the world) was cancelled was because some people started to suggest changes like swaping Robotnik for a new villain.

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

The missed opportunity to have made a stunning 2D Sonic on 32X or Saturn. I just think a Sonic as damn beautiful as say Astal. As a kid then tho even I was swept up in the 3D craze. That craze cost us a lot of what could have been 2D masterpieces. Damn mid 90s.

I think it would have been cool to see this game actually come out, its a cool idea and I think sonic is a good fit for it too.

funfact: this vid was posted on 11/28/20 sometime around 12:00pm

The nights into dreams bit made me think of the story of duke nukem forever

I kid you not, right after you said "what could go wrong" my KZfaq app crashed

The famous cancelled SONIC game

Approved by a turtle.

If you want to talk about the prototypes, I'd rather see you talk about fan efforts to restore/finish the game. I remember there being several over the years.

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

Sonic Xtreme wouldn’t have saved the Saturn ESPECIALLY WITH SUPER MARIO 64 RELEASING THAT YEAR but, I wish it did come out.

I don't know much about the early history of Sonic Robo Blast 2, but I wonder how much inspiration it took from X-Treme. Unless I'm misremembering, the early sprites for Sonic in SRB2 were pretty similar to how X-Treme looked.

Sonic was not the only game sega wanted to make into a 3D title before they even could. they also wanted to make a 3D Streets Of Rage game in 1994 titled "Streets Of Rage 4" (not to be confused with the newer "Streets Of Rage 4" on the switch)

i always felt like had sonic xtreme came out it would be remembered as that mediocre attempt at 3d on a console no one owned. so pretty much top ten fodder and a footnote in a sonic retrospective.

11:10 bro roasted Sega so hard

So. Basically. Sonic. Lost. World.

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

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

honestly, Sonic Xtreme looks like hell and i think the head of the sonic team at the time was right when he said "good luck"

I would be lying if I said that I think this game doesn’t deserve another chance. The main reason for that is I feel Tiara needs to have her time in the spotlight, mostly because she’s my favourite female character in the series. I love her design, and I’m glad she was in the Sonic World fangame. I just hope SEGA remembers she exists in the future.. this year, aka Sonic’s 30th Anniversary, would be a great time for her to be playable, or even mentioned at all. But, it’s probably just wishful thinking..

The stream return from oh no laggy 64 and knuckles

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

About time he covered it

I think sega may not have been ruined if this game was released. There was even going to have a promotional movie for the game. And aside from sonic 3D blast, this would have been the only main line sonic game on the Sega Saturn.

Would love to see more of this.

Dang it looked cool

This game supposed to have a movie

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

I’m just glad that we got Sonic Adventure instead