Sonic X-treme (Point Of View)

Sonic X-treme
System(s): Sega Saturn
Publisher: Sega
Developer: Point of View
Genre: Action
Status of prototype(s): Prototype dumped

The Point Of View (POV) iteration of Sonic X-treme (or "Sonic Extreme") is a version of the game developed by third-party studio Point of View. Sega of America contracted this group to port Ofer Alon's game engine from the PC to the Sega Saturn (despite the fact this was already being done). Progress was made, but the project stopped at the demands of then-president of Sega, Hayao Nakayama.

The POV iteration of X-treme, as seen in the 1996-07-14 prototype.

As Ofer Alon and director Chris Senn continued to work on their version of the game, the POV version can be seen as an unsuccessful branch of the Sonic X-treme story. The 1996-07-14 prototype is the only known surviving build of this iteration of the game, and suggests that that it got to a state where you could move Sonic around an unfinished version of Jade Gully, but it is not expected to have progressed much further.

History

Main article: Sonic X-treme/Development#Point of View

Around early 1996, STI tech director Robert Morgan took Ofer Alon's engine and tools to Point of View, a company co-founded that same year by Morgan, in an attempt to get the engine's Saturn output to render at a playable framerate. Unfortunately, this was done entirely without either Alon or Chris Senn's knowledge, and when the two were informed, the two considered it deeply insulting to their work so far, directly leading to the creation of the independently-developed Sonic PC. Ultimately, Point of View was not able to achieve a satisfactory engine on the Saturn: it was their poor performance which caused Shoichiro Irimajiri's displeasure on his March 1996 visit, and resulted in the Sega of Japan executive ordering all development moved to Christina Coffin's boss engine, Project Condor.