User:CartridgeCulture/To do

• Outline: Build an outline before you do anything. This topic has lots of sub-topics which cover other sub-topics etc, and this all needs to be written from the top-down.
• Sources: Mirror everything that isn't already mirrored. Those links at the bottom of the page apparently contain interviews, ensure they're mirrored too. Because this article lacks references, you're gonna have to build a list of sources from scratch. I guarantee we're gonna double the content of these pages on this step alone. Ensure every developer in Production credits has a reference. Run a search for interviews for every developer on the project.
• Periods: Per Black Squirrel below, it's probably best to split X-treme's coverage into eras - Sonic-16, Sonic Mars (merging its "isometric concept"), main Sat branch, Point Of View branch, and Project Condor branch. A lot of this info is already where it belongs, but a lot isn't.
• Disambig: Consider not a straight disambig page but a general-coverage "Sonic X-treme" page, which covers the project as a whole and links to the individual development periods. This might not be necessary (see first bullet point) but would address the issue of our main X-treme page also serving as the main branch era page (when a main X-treme page should ideologically be defined as the whole project, not just its most recognizable form)
• Intro: Each page's intro needs to state that this is part of the larger X-treme project in the same style of writing, and provide a clear link to earlier/later iterations (maybe at bottom of introduction in dedicated line). Perhaps this can be done in the infobox, like we do with pages like AM2.
• Development: History (as in press history, prerelease stuff) and Development (what the developers were doing, technical stuff) need to be more clearly distinguished. Any info not on the Development subpage already needs to be moved there, and vice versa. Determine if the split is even necessary (probably, but check). There will be some overlap here. Earlier iterations might not have enough content to warrant a dedicated subpage.
• Legacy: This page's "Future" needs merging with Legacy, and the ROM rediscovery section needs to be moved out of the main history and into Legacy as well.
• Misc: Redirects, working names, any necessary categories or image tags, etc.

TO DO

• Find Sega of America Daddys & Daughters Day 1994 date.
• List music tracks used in the project.
• Organize and categorize all media. Host anything we're missing.
• Conclusion: Add descriptions for all magazine entries. List Red Shoes mistakes.
• Conclusion: Combine pages of Yasuhara's concept art book into a single .PDF (or multiple, if there are a few books)
• Conclusion: Find magazine issues for Sonic X-treme/Magazine articles.
• Conclusion: Who is that unknown STI developer?

Sources

• Everything possible from the available dumps
• Senntient forums
• SXC (make sure we're not missing anything, esp. stories)
• Michael Kosaka - Sonic Mars Game Script 1.1 (1994-05-17) (where is this on the wiki?)
• Michael Kosaka - Sonic 32X Game Script 1.x (199x-xx-xx) (where is this on the wiki?)
• All E3 videos, everything. Everything from here, use this to make a list, upload what we're missing.
• E3 1996 promo video
• "4worlds", internal pitch video
• SonicDEMO96, internal pitch video
• The Anti-Gravity Room SxxExx
• File:MTV'SRocktheRockSonic&Knuckles1994 US Video.mp4 (Tiara Boobowski concept art being drawn by Chris Senn at STI, glean other info)

Hire/leave dates

• Mike Wallis (hired Nov 1994}}
• Michael Kosaka (left early/Summer 1995)
• Dean Lester (left late/Summer 1995}

List of developers by era

Sonic Mars ("pitch")

• Chris Ebert
• Christian Senn
• Jeremy Cantor
• Michael Kosaka
• Roger Hector
• Toshi Morita

Sonic Mars (existing credits) (all Sonic Mars creds. need to be checked against above "pitch"

• Director: Roger Hector
• Producer: Mike Wallis
• Lead Designer: Michael Kosaka
• Lead Designer: Christian Senn
• Lead Programmer: Don Goddard
• Programmers: Chris Ebert, Toshiyasu Morita
• Art Director: Don Goddard
• Artist: Jeremy Cantor
• 3D Modeler: Ross Harris
• Writers: Michael Kosaka, Christian Senn, Don Goddard

Sonic Mars (new credits)

• Producer: Michael Kosaka
• Team Coordinator: Michael Kosaka
• Co-Lead Designer: Chris Senn, Michael Kosaka
• Animator: Chris Senn
• Programmer: Chris Ebert
• Promotional Artwork: Jeremy Cantor

Sonic X-treme and Project Condor, members not listed below, i.e. "non-core"

• Director: Roger Hector (?)
• Programmers: Don Goddard, Chris Ebert (?), Toshi Morita
• Designers: Michael Kosaka (?)
• Conceptual Artist: Tony DeZuniga ?
• Dean Lester
• Mark Kupper
• Robert Morgan
• Manny Granillo
• Alan Ackerman
• Betty Cunningham
• Dave Sanner
• Dean Ruggles
• Robert Steele ("managed artists")
• Stieg Hedlund
• Kunitake Aoki
• Hirokazu Yasuhara

Sonic X-treme and Project Condor "Core Team"

• Producer: Mike Wallis
• Team Coordinator: Chris Senn
• Co-Lead Designers: Chris Senn, Ofer Alon
• Art Director: Chris Senn
• World Layout Designer: Richard Wheeler
• Boss Programming: Chris Coffin
• Boss Layout Designer: Jason Kuo
• Computer Graphics Artists: Fei Cheng, Andrew Probert
• Conceptual Art Designers: Fei Cheng, Ross Harris, Andrew Probert
• Conceptual Gameplay Design: Chris Coffin, Richard Wheeler
• Lead Programmer: Ofer Alon
• Lead Computer Graphics Artist: Ross Harris
• Animator: Ross Harris
• Technical Director: Ofer Alon
• Music and Sound Effects Director: Howard Drossin
• Conceptual Music Composer: Chris Senn
• Composer: Howard Drossin

Sonic X-treme and Project Condor "Core Team", post-May 95 streamline

• Chris Senn
• Mike Wallis

Project Condor alone

• Christina Coffin
• Dean Ruggles
• Jamie Bible (Contract Programmer)
• Jason Kuo
• Mark Kupper
• Mike Wallis
• Richard Wheeler
• Yasuhara Hirokazu

Sonic X-treme PC version

• Designer: Chris Senn
• Artist: Chris Senn
• Composer: Chris Senn
• Programmer: Ofer Alon

Images

Development

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  STI main branch team (Spring 1996)

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  STI main branch team (Spring 1996)

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  Ross Harris (Spring 1996)

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  Andrew Probert (Spring 1996)

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  Unknown STI guy who looks like Chris Ebert but probably isnt (Spring 1996)

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  Rick Wheeler (Spring 1996)

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  X-treme stage concept flowchart (Spring 1996)

E3 1996

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  E3 1996

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  E3 1996

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  E3 1996

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  E3 1996

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  Sega Rocks the House of Sonic Blues

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  Sega Rocks the House of Sonic Blues VIP access

Prerelease: Main branch

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  Test Act

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  Jade Gully

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  Crystal Frost

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  Red Sands

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  Galaxy Fortress

Prerelease: Condor

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  Jade Gully (Sega Gamer's Day 1996)

Prerelease: Condor - Mecha Sonic

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  Death Egg

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Prerelease: Condor - Fang the Sniper

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Prerelease: Condor - Gemstone

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Artwork

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  Mecha Sonic wireframe

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  Mecha Sonic model

Story

“	"There were numerous storylines for Sonic X-treme. What motivated the game design ranged from the narrative to some game mechanic or element that seemed the strongest and most interesting. Michael Kosaka’s Sonic Mars story helped direct my enemy character designs for the game. Initially they were very “computer” and “tech” inspired but gradually fit more in line with the classic Sonic enemy style as developed between Sonic 1-3. My Sonic Saturn storyline definitely affected the game design by requiring that Sonic rescue not only his friends but Robotnik, too – from a new threat, the Chaos Elementals. Later on, my Sonic Twist storyline was inspired directly by Ofer Alon’s twisting world concept for the game. It really depended on the storyline and what stage of development the game was in at the time, but rarely did the story and gameplay lack strong ties to one another."	„
— Designer Chris Senn

• Archie tie-in comic considered near beginning of development
• Story has admittedly gone through multiple iterations
• Contains Chaos Emeralds
• Not titled Sonic 4 because the gameplay was such a departure from previous entries
• Everything from the Red Shoe Diaries
• Death Egg's gravitational pull, 5 worlds, rescue MipsMedia:SonicXtremeAdvertisement2.jpg
• Six magical Rings of OrderMedia:STC Summer '96 - Xtreme.jpg
• Master Ring SmithMedia:STC Summer '96 - Xtreme.jpg, "Ringsmiths"
• Professor BoobowskiMedia:STC Summer '96 - Xtreme.jpg, Gazebo Boobowski
• Tiara, daughter of prof
• Prof. and Tiara are ring-keepers
• Robotnik kidnapping Prof. and Tiara (I missed some in the first 4 mag articles)
• From Lost Levels article/interview: "The game began with Sonic doing a little surfing and spotting the Bluestreak distress signal in the sky. Using this signal were two new characters, an old man named Professor Gazebo Boobowski, and his daughter, Tiara B. (right) (it is to be noted that neither of these characters would be playable). These characters were “Keepers of the magical Rings of Order”, and Sonic had been summoned to their castle, “wherein they practice the ancient art of ring smithing”. This is where series mainstay Dr. Robotnik entered the picture. Robotnik was after the Rings of Order, and had, in fact, already made an attempt at stealing the Rings, losing them somehow; and so, Sonic was charged with finding the Rings before Robotnik, giving impetus to the gameplay." According to Wallis, this story was created by “a combination of Michael Kosaka (original executive producer and designer), Chris Senn, and Rick Wheeler (Designer, world layout lead and conceptual gameplay design), with some input from Jason Kuo (Boss layout lead) as well."
• Sonic on beach, Prof. Gazebo call, Gazebo is ringsmith who makes rings (Satam tie-in, this is where Ring Worlds comes from).
• "The "Rings of Order" was part of a simple story generated for a news article in a magazine at a point when the real game story was in progress. The magazine needed something to print and the team wasn’t ready with a final story. The idea behind it leveraged the concept that there were magical rings, special rings, that coincided with the Chaos Emeralds that provided order to the Universe when kept together. Using this as a setup, any number of things could happen - not the least of which was Robotnik stealing them and Sonic trying to "restore order" by replacing them."

Gameplay

“	"The basic gameplay was focusing on Sonic being in 3D for the first time... so running, spindashing, etc. in a 3D world. Collecting rings was still the bread and butter goal while getting through the levels. Everything else stemmed from this classic set up... just variety in the scenery, concepts, special objects per world, etc…the gameplay was further enhanced by the enemies that populated each world. A lot of thought was put into giving the enemies personality, attacks, and defenses that really changed how the player needed to navigate/act/react when near them. This branched out to some of the initial basic power-ups, as well, further intertwining more levels of basic gameplay."	„
— Designer Chris Senn

• GAMEPLAY: Wall hotspot refs
• GAMEPLAY: Snakey paths (alongside fisheye) are means of maintaining traditional 2D Sonic speed with the limited camera real estate of 3D sonic's world.
• GAMEPLAY: Three acts each, with each emphasizing a diff. gameplay style. This mention references "puzzles" (Unknown Wallis interview? source)
• GAMEPLAY: Core gameplay was just "Sonic running around in a 3D world, collect rings, avoid enemies", nothing more. Think how Mario 64 had a lot of parts designed to familiarize players with a 3D environment, but applied on a larger "core gameplay" level.
• GAMEPLAY: Reflex lens as compensation for limited camera view in Sonic's new 3D world.
• Senn wrote, "Yasuhara-san's level designs for Xtreme were for 3D gameplay. The idea was to free Sonic into full 3D. I'm not sure how the designs would have worked using Ofer's fixed camera (that translated but never rotated about the vertical axis) - as his camera allowed for faster calculation. If a different camera were used (say one that could rotate around corners), the gameplay probably would have been quite different."
• World rotation created by Ofer Alon
• POWERUPS: Standard (1-up, Ring-up and Time-up), Shoes (Speed & Traction), PowerShields (see below), Rings (Snake, Twist & Homing), Bomb (H-Ball). "The powerups were to be contained in a rotating sphere, with Sonic having to spindash or land on one to get the power up. Shields were based around a concept called "Elements". Elements represented the six powers that Sonic could unlock. There was a hierarchy of power whereby each Element was stronger than the next with the last Element being stronger than the first, thus making a Circle of Power. Every other Element could be combined together to make one of two special "PowerShields"."
• Elemental Circles of Power: Metal (cuts Rock), Rock (shields from Lightning), Lightning (electrifies Wind), Wind (extinguishes Fire), Fire (evaporates Water), Water (rusts Metal)
• PowerShields: (Metal - Lightning - Fire), (Rock - Wind - Water)
• Senn once envisioned a different gameplay mode for each character. Modes: Sonic from 3/4 (standard) view, Tails from "Tails Cam" (behind him), Knuckles from top-down, Tiara from side-scrolling 2D perspective. Other than demo animations, these alternate modes never went anywhere, although Knuckles had some stuff made
• Alon insisted they focus exclusively on Sonic to keep things simply for his first 3D outing.
• Bosses are big for two reasons: that it was impressive, but more importantly it made the bosses easier to hit, a "first time in 3D" design choice.
• Blue for weak enemies, red for strong
• Sonic intended to be a 3D model early in development, but was quickly scrapped for pre-rendered
• Super Sonic considered, but dropped to focus on ensuring the non-Super Sonic gameplay would be fun, considering it was the character's first time in 3D.
• Playable characters: Sonic, Tails maybe, Knuckles for sure, Amy maybe (Coffin ref), Tiara maybe
• Characters: Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Dr. Eggman, Amy (Coffin ref), Tiara, Fang the Sniper, Chaos Elementals, Mips, Archie characters (Sally, etc.)
• No Robotnik art/models made. He would have likely been represented in Condor (think Coffin's "dumb ai" boss, Egg Mobile, etc)
• Tiara designed by Senn as a means to give Sonic a love interest, not inspired by Sally
• "Mips were the replacement for Flickies. Each zone had a unique design of Mip, with it’s own color and movement. The name "Mip" was dubbed by Michael Kosaka and is an abbreviation for a computer term "Million Instructions Per Second"."
• "Teleporters" with transparency
• Reflex/fisheye lens
• Gravity/Rotation features, previously described as "full 3D camera rotation"
• Camera angles change according to gameplayMedia:GamePro83june1996pageunknown.jpg
• Planned that Sonic couldn't run up walls or change gravity anywhere, but at specific transition points, possibly half-loops
• Surfing and bungee jumping gameplay (likely the source of the "extreme sports" stuff seen on X-treme's ice cream bars)(also in Red Shoes)
• 4worlds: Invincibility item (a white sphere with Sonic's head) and "50 points" item, enemies lack collision. Mushroom springs (later seen in Condor Fang fight), skull switches which Sonic must touch to activate snakey paths, as opposed to DEMO96's later "panel on floor". Snakey paths not activated by touching switches are always visible. Features no music.
• SonicDEMO96: Falling in pits hurts Sonic but only takes away 4 rings. Features a purely invisible snakey section which shows a bridge-like object under Sonic as he travels it, kind of like a magic carpet? Probably just a neat affect for snakey sections. Sonic can now take damage from and defeat enemies. Sonic's animations are running far faster than normal, likely to compensate for how slowly the code ran when it was ported to the Saturn. Also features a NiGHTS "auto-flying through loops in the sky" snakey section, operates the same way. Features a normal conveyer belt, golf ball and drill hat enemies, bombs without collision which stomp up and down, bubbles which light up and fly away. Features the music Space Queens or w/e that song is. Invincibility returns, but I don't see 50 points.
• Certain "snakey" surfaces lock Sonic into place as he runs along them, although he can jump off them. By DEMO96 demo, these sections could also be marked to rotate the camera for loops or not, and generally warp the camera in interesting ways along its path. Can also generate a dust trail for Sonic.
• Collecting a ring doesn't remove the Ring sprite, but instead slowly scales it into Sonic with a unique animation.

Abilities

• Spin Dash
• Spin Slash: a mid-air version of the Spin Dash where Sonic transforms into a high-speed sawblade. Addt. refs:Media:STC Summer '96 - Xtreme.jpg Previously known as the Spin Bash. There was no differentiation between Spin Slash and Spin Dash except for the former taking place in air.
• Ring Throw: Sonic throws a Ring as an attack, which would deplete actual ring count. Addt. refs:
• Sonic Streak: Unknown. Previously known as the Spin Streak.Media:STC Summer '96 - Xtreme.jpg
• Never left concept/planning: Power Ball, Super Bounce, Ring Shield, Sonic Boom
• Ducking (repeated by two other press outlets in the content of "running, jumping, and ducking through a 3D environment", likely generic "platformer" talk without realizing what was being said.)

Acts

• Cutscenes planned for beginning and end of Acts.
• Each level is a huge, multi-story construction
• Planned bonus stages similar to "how it was in previous Sonic games"
• Spikes, pits, what other stage hazards?
• 15 levels. 7 levels: 2 acts and one boss each. Bosses counted as acts for 3 acts per level. Gamer's Day 96: 4 "zones", 3 acts each, 12 total stages, final pre-cancel specs.
• Senn: configuration of numbers of acts per w/e changed multiple times during development
• Each act would emphasize a different ability or gameplay feature, like speed or precision platforming.
• Titlecard for Jade Gully in 4worlds
• Crystal Frost
• Red Sands
• Jade Gully
• Galaxy Fortress

Enemies

• Kosaka's early Mars story resulted in Senn's early enemy designs being loosely tech/computer themed
• MAKE ENEMY LIST
• 28 enemies, not including bosses
• Mainbranch bosses: A boss that chased Sonic around the arena, another where the world would wrap back around to itself "carousel-style", and a possible boss which would throw its head at Sonic and grow another.
• Condor bosses: Fang, Metal Sonic, and an "evil Sonic clone". All 3 had "reasonably-polished" AI before cancellation. A 4th boss was a "dumb" ai which operated similarly to early-zone boss fights in the MD Sonic games, and required far fewer resources. May have been the "Gemstone" boss.
• Fang was a fully 3D model, head-tracked to Sonic, could cover his head to protect from being jumped on, was made noticeably larger than Sonic, and could toss grenades
• Metal Sonic was modeled to be gigantic

Music and sound

• Senn created about 55 pieces of conceptual music from 1994-1996 intended to inspire creative discussion and help him envision other aspects of his design work
• Drossin was main composer and would have been so for the final game, but only made a few pieces late in mainbranch's development
• Chris Senn composed a few early "concept" tracks for the game, but Howard Drossin was the composer of the game's "final" tracks.
• No sound effects created
• SENN'S EQUIPMENT
• Ensoniq ESQ-1
• Ensoniq Mirage
• Ensoniq TS-10
• Boss DR-550
• Sequenced with Cakewalk 3.0 for Windows 98 (does Senn mean 95?)
• Space Queens coverage
• Coffin using Sonic CD JP tracks for Condor

History

• PLATFORM ROADMAP: 32X (Mars) > Saturn (Mars) > V08/TNT (Mars or X-treme) > Saturn (X-treme)

Development

“	"Sonic Xtreme underwent many changes and difficulties that would have tested even the most seasoned game industry veterans. Lack of experience, poor business decisions, ego, politics, over-ambition, bad timing, poor communication... these were some of the ingredients that ultimately spelled disaster for the game. Bringing Sonic into 3D for the first time was a huge challenge - not only for gameplay, but from a technology standpoint as well. This made the job of defining what the game should be more difficult, but doubly so as the technology and platforms changed. In the first year and a half the team went through three programmers, causing the game’s technology to basically restart each time. Problems like this took a toll on the budget and created more pressure for the entire team down the line."	„
— Designer Chris Senn

Background

“	"We had artists doing art for levels that hadn't even been concepted out. We had programmers waiting and waiting and waiting until every minute detail had been concepted out, and we had designers doing whatever the hell they wanted. It was a mess and because of the internal politics (the art director had trained his art team to hate the designers and programmers), it was even more difficult to get any work done."	„
— Producer Mike Wallis

• Cover SoA disagreements with SoJ, and their reported distrust of American handling of the Sonic franchise.
• STI already had a slow development environment in mid 1992, attributed by Morawiec to a generous budget and lack of oversight.
• "Sega is the only place I've been at where you had to program the most optimized version of your code before they would let you move on to a new programming concept." (Goddard) might be another contributing factor to "STI Slow".
• Sonic was considered STI's main franchise "STI's focus was to create character properties that could be built into a franchise."
• Hedlund recalls "the atmosphere encouraged presentations that were all surface and no substance, since there was no time or forum to go into depth. We became adept at creating MTV-style smash-cut videos." He additionally recalls the need for constantly presenting projects for check-ins with management slowed down the creative process, something Die Hard Arcade did not suffer from (because it was technically attributed to AM1 and the team had more carte-blanche) With an American team handling Sonic, this would have been the exact opposite.
• Slow development explained as "approaching the game's design with a spirit of adventure and uncertainty" and that the team was "leaving the [design of the] project open for as long as possible" until a team member thought of an idea. "Everyone has their own mental image of how the game should come together"

Sonic Mars

“	"Michael was studying the previous Sonic games and creating the design document for the game…I seem to remember making some 2D side-view animations of Sonic at that early stage. My first real artwork consisted of two animations demonstrating the game concept. They were flat-shaded and looked like actual games in action. I even made ring-counters that incremented when Sonic picked them up. These animations were to be used to sell the concept to the executives."	„
— Designer Chris Senn

• 32X timeframe, up to V08: 1994-1995
• Michael Kosaka was team leader, created the MARS design doc (gameplay design), and penned the Mars story. When he left, Senn took the opportunity to go in a direction w/ the design that excited him more. Kosaka's design was solid and more traditional Sonic, but Senn wanted to explore new ways of approaching the design, story, etc.
• During the 32X era, game design wasn't fully formed enough to determine if the hardware could even run the game.
• Senn was hired early 1994 (or earlier), and his work on Mars through X-treme was focused on art direction, character design, game design, level design, and team coordination.
• Mid to Fall 1994: Chris Senn working as a character designer at STI, and artwork of him drawing Tiara concept art appears in the Rock the Rock TV special (Oct 1994). Hector identifies the Mars dev team as "Sonic Team".
• Late 94: S&K released, STI staffs up more. Sonic X-treme (at the time called Sonic 32X) was very early in development, mostly just technical prototypes and very early character concepts.
• November 94: Wallis told he'd be working on an upcoming Sonic project with Kosaka, Senn, and Goddard, slated for the 32X
• Sept 94: Goddard joins STI and begins working on the game.
• At this point, despite being in development with the intended 32X's specs, SoA management was already considering moving development to the company's upcoming Saturn's specs (not TNT or SoJ Sat specifically, but just "more capable specs") Because the team didn't have a solid answer on the choice of platform, the demos were rendered on the conservative side, with flat-shaded graphics more comparable to the 32X. Reportedly, the Sonic Mars team had no input on the game's target platform. (Mike Wallis, Playing at the Next Level, 2015-01-07 email interview by Ken Horowitz)
• The early team (Kosaka, Senn, Ebert, Cantor) produced a number of technical tests for the 32X platform. As the platform was still in development, its proposed specs were changing on a regular basis, making it even more difficult to program for. There were Senn's "Amiga demos". These early tests were used to pitch the game to Kalinske, Toyoda, and 2-3 other execs, who said the graphics would have a hard time competing with games boasting complex graphics like DKC. The team argued the graphics could improve, but the videos showed the gameplay clearly.
• The SoA executives insisted on seeing more loops, rings, and traditional 2D Sonic staples. Chris Senn was so disheartened he almost cried. SoA wanted a game they were describing as more like Sonic Adventure.
• According to Senn, Yuji Naka "had strong beliefs that only his Japanese team should work on Sonic." When Senn's Amiga demos were presented to Naka and other Sega executives, he shook his head and told Senn "good luck."
• The Sonic 32X project was intended as a launch title for the system, leaving the small team scrambling to work as fast as possible.
• STI was very much inspired to move to 3D after the release of Virtua Fighter.
• Goddard and the team realized the 32X would only be able to reasonably render a few hundred polygons at once (nowhere near what they would need for a fun game world), so Goddard created a 3D Doom-like engine which could smoothly rotate 90 degrees in any direction (including up and down) allowing for "loops". He says the team couldn't come up with more than one concept for a "rail-style" game (probably something Crash Bandicoot-ish) when the original intention was a free-roaming 3D game, so this idea was scrapped.
• Goddard programmed a "blazingly fast scaled/rotated sprite routine" which let them display thousands of sprites at once, and created a demo where Sonic runs around on a black background with about a thousand Rings bouncing around the screen. Running at 60fps, it was playable at SoA's "Daddys and Daughters Day". Shinobu brought his daughter, and they both played and enjoyed the game, despite the demo being admittedly basic.
• Following this demo, the dev team went ham with the idea of making things from sprites, including Senn designing multiple monsters constructed out of Rings (think Gunstar Heroes' block man boss, but with sprite scaling) Goddard recalls they were possibly going to design a specific zone(s) populated with these Ring creatures.
• Ring creatures would appear as either a stack of rings or a giant one, and would slink around the playfield. When hit, they would explode into smaller rings which could be collected as a unique gameplay mechanic.
• Early/Summer 95: Exec producer and lead designer Michael Kosaka leaves STI over political tensions between him and Dean Lester. This leaves the Sonic 32X team with only 4 other team members. 1 concept artist, a designer, and two programmers, but no leader. At this time, the game was still very much in pre-production.
• Late summer 1995 - Exec producer Dean Lester leaves, replaced by Manny Granillo. Wallis is moved over to the Sonic X-treme project several months later in an attempt to save it.
• Alon was hired in the era just before X-treme was being moved to the Saturn. Before this, Goddard had been the only programmer on the project for 3 months. See if we have a hire date for Goddard.
• "Mark Kupper was a tools guy trying to build a 3D modeler animation program for the artists"
• Gary McTaggart, an outside programmer experienced in 3D engines and Doom specifically, was recommended by Kupper and had a great interview with management. Despite being cheap to hire, management dragged their feet and he was never hired. Later, Goddard made another attempt to acquire another programmer with his own recommendation, Midway's John Morgan (of Super Off-Road fame) He also had a very positive interview and was equally qualified for the project, but was also never called back.
• Reportedly, the dev team ran into a common theme of their requests going unanswered and unfulfilled for months at a time.
• In the period before Alon was hired and Goddard was the only programmer (around them trying to hire McTaggart), Goddard had been clamoring for programming help from Dean Lester, and a THIRD attempt was made. Lester said he'd found a programmer from the Middle East who had previously worked on a Mac game and had made an impressive demo. Goddard flew him into Redwood City, and felt, like Ruggles, he had a superior attitude about knowing what was best for the project. To their surprise, this programmer, Ofer Alon, was hired and began working 3 weeks later.
• Ofer was "very expensive" to hire, and would reportedly agree to gameplay designs when speaking to fellow staff, but would later ignore these requests and perform his own work. He seemed to only get along with Chris Senn, the source of the actual "game design" ideas.
• While Toyoda/Hector understood that X-treme didn't need to include every element of 2D sonic games (loops, clean lines of rings, etc), the press (and even elements of SoA's non-Toyoda/Hector management) would constantly ask where these things were, and expecting more performance than the game would ever be able to deliver.
• Goddard did make some fast, optimized 32X code, but the 32X was still the flawed platform it is, so this likewise went nowhere.
• Goddard's team took a look at early Saturn specs and were extremely turned off, seeing it as a complicated mess to develop for. Still, they began running technical evaluations and familiarizing themselves with the hardware.
• Early into learning the Saturn's specs, Coffin was hired (who had coincidentally worked with John Morgan in the past). Coffin was described as being a passionate developer and fun to work with. However, for some reason she grew paranoid early into the project and make a few enemies, in particular Ofer Alon.
• During this time, Goddard was still attempting to get Ofer Alon to cooperate or listen to any of their requests. He continued to refuse, and would now lock himself inside his office for the entirety of the business day. He also began willfully ignoring members of the staff, reportedly creeping Goddard out (who worked in the office next to Alon's).
• Chris Ebert spent ten months coding a 32X demo in which a camera would fly over a single line of ten polygons.
• Tensions within the team: Goddard recalls that a good number of SoA staff and people he worked with did not get along with Dean Lester, and than Dean Ruggles was also disliked by the staff, leaving work early every day and once walking out in the middle of a team meeting.
• Sega of America created a series of promotional Sonic X-treme pins which were awarded to the development team.
• Wallis says the team hadn't spent much time actually working with the 32X before they were moved to the V08, and then the Saturn, where actual "development" began to take place. Because of this, he specifies that "releasing X-treme for the 32X wasn't even a consideration".
• Third pitch demo (red tube) may not have been created by Senn.
• The problematic development of the game forced Sega of America to keep the game behind closed doors as opposed to including it in November 10th's (1995) "32XPOSED" 32X announcement event.
• SoA wished to move X-treme off of the 32X because it was tanking.
• Near end of development, after having shown the Mars team the upcoming SoJ Sat specs for some time, ordered them to start developing for said specs. However, this "Mars on Saturn" dev period would not last long, being shifted to Riva in Fall 1995.
• Fall 1995: SoA orders shift from 32X to Riva TNT, wasting months of 32X development (and some Saturn tech work).

Saturn V08

• Fall 1995: SoA orders shift from 32X to Riva TNT (SoA+Nvidia had partnership for the card, and/or SoA owned 1/3 of Nv. Described as "very first Riva") (, wasting months of 32X development (and some Saturn tech work).
• Goddard overheard a conversation Roger Hector and other executives were having with Alon in his office, discussing a potential "Saturn-killer" (SoA hated the Saturn that much). Being left out of this discussion bothered Goddard, and at this point he had had enough of Sonic, leading to his eventual departure from the company.
• At this time, SoA presented STI with Nvidia's Riva TNT. The broad concept for the platform shown to STI's tech director Robert Morgan for evaluation. (Mike Wallis, Playing at the Next Level, 2015-01-07 email interview by Ken Horowitz) This was reportedly liked by management more than SoJ's Saturn, and was more 3D capable. (Mike Wallis, Playing at the Next Level, 2015-01-07 email interview by Ken Horowitz) It spent several months in evaluation.
• Just as the "Saturn killer" was going to be a Western-developed attempt "to show SoJ how to do things", X-treme was going to be the game version of that, and this is a big part of why it was intended as launch game for the V08.
• The Saturn-killer (nvidia TNT/Saturn V08/what would become NV1) was described by Goddard as being extremely capable, with the unique ability to morph polygon vertexes in-hardware for performance gains, and with build-in hardware colored lighting. Think a unique rendering feature like the Saturn using quads opposed to triangles. Unfortunately, Sega passed on the platform as the industry was used to rendering with triangles and preferred to keep it that way. This was mirrored by SegaSoft (STI's largest internal competitor who, as described by Goddard, was jealous of STI's unlimited funding). Ironic considering the SoJ-pushed Saturn ended up not using triangles anyway.
• The V08/NV1 was reportedly a response to the powers of the upcoming PS1. Sega also owned something like 1/3 stake in nvidia, hence the cooperation.
• Ofer was very briefly doing tech evaluations with the NV1, and Goddard was working on early experimental game prototypes for it. Reportedly, integrating the NV1's unique curved polygon capabilities into the existing graphics pipeline was a nightmare. This didn't last more than a few months, with the project soon returning to Saturn specs.
• Goddard and Alon were also courted by 3Dfx, who promised a chip with the unique ability for development emulators to perform 1:1 with the final product. Nothing became of this.
• During this time, Goddard had developed an extensive "UFO demo" for the NV1 hardware, and had invested a great deal of effort into the project. When Sega dropped the NV1, his work had gone to waste, and after spending a few months away from the Sonic project, quit Sega entirely in June.
• Around Fall 1995: Wallis and team spends up to three months on V08 evaluations, meaning the team was largely sitting around (outside those on evaluation duty). During this time, they never received any TNT documentation, tech specs, or dev kits, which further left the team's direction in limbo.
• Around Fall 1995: To achieve this move to TNT, STI shifted all development team resources onto the project. Wallis recalls they probably had 9-10 artists & animators, 4 programmers, 3 designers, a sound guy, myself, and an exec producer.
• Some early tech was created and was supported more than the potential Saturn by SoA, but SoJ came in and ordered the TNT evaluations cancelled. Everything was then moved to the Saturn.
• Apparently, nvidia did actually print a "Saturn-version of the NV1" chip, reportedly in a great rush. This was shipped to Sega, who installed in and turned it on, only for it to instantly fail and display nothing more than a black screen. With that, Sega dropped the project on the spot.
• Around late 1995: Riva TNT dropped, SoJ forces SoA to go with the actual Saturn, and development is shifted to the Saturn. This was less SoJ ordering an X-treme platform shift, but instead killing the platform it was on, leaving SoA and the team with no other option

Sonic X-treme main branch

X-treme name was chosen either sometime before or on the switch to the Saturn.

• Kosaka left 1yr into development (of X-treme?), Senn became temporary producer while mgmt looks for another. Mgmt (Hector and Lester) decided Senn should be actual producer.
• "We could have eventually achieved something similar to what NiGHTS was like—that would probably be the best comparison." – Mike Wallis
• Senn created 50 enemy designs. Ross Harris would then modeled 3D sprites based upon his concept art.
• Where does this Mike Wallis quote come from? "3D Sonic is free to move around in a completely open 3D environment. Previously, on the 2D games, things were restricted to a very linear path, whereas now he can run around in the open without any restrictions to his path. The 360-degree rotation allows for new aspects to the gameplay. It means that Sonic can now do things like run from a wall onto the ceiling and explore lots of new hidden areas."
• According to Wallis, the Spin Splash would have been performed midair to cause more damage or attack a larger area than jumping alone. He also says it would have been cut in the final version for being too similar to a midair Spin Dash in execution.
• Wallis says the Ring Toss was removed for not working with the gameplay, recalling "things that sound good on paper don’t always translate into a good game feature."
• Iri's Mar 96 visit: when viewing main branch, he "was outraged to see how much was left to be done", according to Senn. According to Senn, Iri viewed the POV version, and later Condor. Iri hated that POV still had so much work left to do, but saw Coffin's engine and "ordered" everything moved to that.
• Senn recalls Iri's visit as instead being by a "Nakayama-san". "He said firmly, "make the game like [Chris Coffin's boss engine level]". Due to the importance of Nakayama-san, being at the top chain of command, nobody could go against his decree.
• Alon/Senn's "PC port" was something they worked on concurrently with mainbranch and Condor. It was reportedly in a demonstrable state by Iri's visit, but because he left so quickly following his disappointment, they weren't able to do so.
• Unfortunately, the attitude from SOJ was: Anything remotely looking like Ofer's old version should not continue. I think this was a political reason why the PC group at SOA decided to pass on our PC version.

• Below split happened on or shortly following move to SoJ Saturn
• Between late '95 and early '96: Team split into two groups. Ofer Alon/Chris Senn "main branch", and Chris Coffin (team "leader" for Condor) "boss engine".
• Around early 96: Robert Morgan, STI tech director, takes Alon's PC engine (developed to port code to the Sat, but which ran unacceptably slow) to POV Software in attempts to get a smooth Sat version.
• March 1996: Head of SOJ Irimajiri visits STI with his entourage. Wallis and team show him their progress and he is disappointed with the work on the main game engine thus far. However, when shown what Coffin has been doing on the boss levels, he says, "I like this. Make the whole game like this." Then he left shortly after this statement.
• March 1996: Wallis goes to exec producer (Roger Hector?) and VP (Toyoda?) and told them the only way we had any semblance of hope of finishing this game for Christmas was to give Wallis the control he previous lacked as a producer, get rid of the "political crap", isolate a core team, and give them the tools necessary to get the job done. SOA/STI management agreed, and with Wallis they pulled a core group of 4 artists, 2 programmers (+ 1 contractor), and 3 designers into the old STI location and got to work.
• Around April 96: Stolar takes over as CEO, visits Wallis at STI. Stolar asks Wallis if he can provide anything needed to further their chance at winning Xmas 96. Wallis consults with team, "it is determined that the NiGHTS engine would be very helpful, as we didn't have time to develop all the tools necessary". Stolar promises to get these tools. Following this, the team receives "some editors", and shortly after, "the engine code". Two weeks later, after the team had familiarized themselves with the editors, Stolar informs the team that SOJ (specifically Naka) forbade them from using "his code". Stolar claims Naka threatened to quit if SoA were allowed to use Sonic Team's technology. The team acquiesces and these 2-3 weeks are wasted.
• May/June 96: Wallis fires an artist/animator "who is being disruptive to the team by not carrying his weight". He is terminated from the project and from Sega.
• June/July/Aug 96: Senn gets super sick. Senn is misattributed in both identity and team responsibilities with Coffin in Wallis' timeline and interview, in multiple places. Specifically, Wallis' timeline claims the project ended because "Coffin's illness took its main programmer out of the project", while a number of other statements (including another interview from Wallis himself!) all attribute this work to Senn's illness "taking its main designer out of the project." Senn tells Wallis he cannot keep working. Shocked at Senn's condition, Wallis tells management the project cannot continue like this, and they will not make Christmas. The game is officially cancelled.
• Late 95: dev team divided into Coffin's (boss stage) group, and Senn (game world design) and Alon's (engine programming) group.
• Goddard speculates the mainbranch's fisheye lens was a means to cover up the lack of true curved environments.
• Despite previous claims, SoJ did support the project in some capacity: Senn says "near the tail end of Sonic X-treme, Yasuhara-san and Aoki-san were enlisted to help the project."
• Ref for Senn working crazy long hours at post-streamline STI
• Irimajiri's March 1996 STI tour: (where he only viewed POV's rough in-progress Sat port instead of the original Senn/Alon PC version), and his desire to see everything moved to Coffin's boss engine.
• Stolar requested Hector isolate the best of STI, provide them all they needed, and have them focus on nothing but X-treme.
• Wallis recalls the "Bernie Stolar to Roger Hector: streamline and isolate" request happened in September of 96. This might have happened a little earlier but check against other dates.
• "Core group" was "locked into" STI's old hq at Redwood Shores 255 1st floor. Brought food, sleeping material, worked 15-16hr shifts before sleeping and repeating.
• Around this time (as part of his assessing SoA resources for Sat dev and marketing, PLAYINGREF maybe), Stolar asked Wallis what was needed to complete Xtreme on time. Wallis and team replied with "the engine in NiGHTS" and all the dev tools associated with it, citing the long development time that creating dedicated devtools would require.
• WALLIS NIGHTS STORY #1: Soon, Stolar reportedly delivered "a NiGHTS editor, a level-based editor". Wallis recalls this spent about two weeks being learned by STI's staff before "Yuji Naka said no." (In next paragraph, Wallis claims it was never given to them. Did Stolar deliver some generic "NiGHTS-like" editor?)
• WALLIS NIGHTS STORY #2: Naka went to "Yuri Maguire" (Irimajiri lol), "head of SoJ at the time", and threatened to quit Sega entirely if the team was given the NiGHTS engine (contradicting his previous statement), and nothing more came of the engine.
• WALLIS NIGHTS STORY #3: Wallis later says that while SoJ was completely uninvolved (not including Irimajiri), they INITIALLY promised to actually deliver the NiGHTS engine, but later "pulled it from us". Pulled what, the request, or the engine?
• NOTE: The above are Wallis' three contradicting stories, but there's a lot of evidence supporting the fact that said engine was never actually delivered. It was very likely requested (or something similar was requested), but Naka himself said it'd be near impossible to adapt.
• Either way, the team did not get access to the dev tools it was seeking, and began developing their own dev tools from scratch (likely those level editor programs from the dump/etc)
• Around this time (July to Septemberish 96), Alon was working on X-treme main branch, developing on a PC with Sat as target platform. Authored PC-based development tools, and while the game ran fine on computer, it chugged when ported to Sat.
• Also around this time (July to Septemberish 96, after E3 appearance), Irimajiri had his visit, saw both PC mainbranch and Sat Condor, liked the latter, and expressed his desire to see development focus on that. Alon (described by Wallis as being particularly proud of his work) grew upset and quit Sega over this. This left virtually everything hanging on Senn.
• As a result of the above, Chris Senn moved out of his apartment, stored all his stuff in a storeroom at Redwood Shores, and moved into the office, working night and day. In this interview, Wallis misidentifies Senn as Coffin (yet correctly attributes her "hot-shot programming" ability to her name, contributing to her misgendering)
• Senn worked for about 7-8 weeks straight, an avg of 20hrs a day, living and showering and eating at Redwood Shores for two months. In late August, he caught "walking" pneumonia and told Wallis it would not be complete for Christmas.
• Upon being told X-treme would have to be cancelled, Stolar revealed he had been working on the SAT port of 3D Blast as a backup, and offered to move Wallis to the project as a producer, which he accepted.
• Wallis implies he, at some point, reached out to SOJ for development assistance, but they were "uncooperative".
• Internal politics
• The team made weekly builds, but most were deleted/destroyed.
• "Extreme pressure" to deliver a top-notch product in X-tremeMedia:ElectronicGamingMonthlyUnknownIssue2.gif
• Senn recalls a strong push to market X-treme before the team had much to show.Media:ElectronicGamingMonthlyUnknownIssue2.gif
• Red Shoes Diaries had the unintended effect of increasing the cycle of marketing hype and added to the team's stressMedia:ElectronicGamingMonthlyUnknownIssue2.gif
• By E3 1996, all Satam references were removed.
• "Everyone else in the company (literally) was working on a different version of the game... based on a game engine Ofer had created before." -Senn
• Development of Sat main branch began during development of Comix Zone.
• Alon's editor was for Mac, or a separate Mac version.
• Serious anxiety among dev team during buildup to E3.
• A little after mid 96: Senn gets super sick, project stalled, and Wallis informed management that they would be completely unable to meet Xmas 96 launch date.
• Late summer 96/October: X-treme cancelled.
• Rick Wheeler joined as an intern
• In July, Stolar was hired and requested that the team be slimmed down, isolated, and provided with all the dev tools needed. They were moved from Palo Alto's STI offices to Redwood Shores SoA offices (in the "old STI" office, specifically)
• Post-E3, press claims Saturn version reportedly uses NiGHTS engineMedia:SonicXtremeUnknownFrenchArticle.jpg
• NIGHTS ENGINE: Refutation, "Q: Was the NiGHTS engine used? A: No. This was discussed at one point, but never became a reality. The Boss engine Christina Coffin created provided a similar look, albeit simpified, to the NiGHTS engine, but the actual engine was never shared or used."
• Chris Coffin says her main competition and inspiration was the boss engine in NiGHTS.
• Mike Wallis is a fan of NiGHTS as well.
• "Sonic Saturn" splash screen created by Ross Harris on a whim, not a working title but only meant to represent "Sonic on the Saturn"
• Harris modeled the 3D Sonic "and other objects" (likely everything 3D) in SoftImage which were later digitized into 2D sprites, and did other pieces of artwork
• Coffin used above "quad bug" to show how certain enemies can be safely attacked from certain angles, and for terrain hazards like spike pits. She refers to a forum signature of a turning cannon, and also a magazine screenshot "showing a bunch of koosh-ball type objects in a small arena with sonic standing near them", as examples of the bug.
• Admitting pressure to deliver and difficulties ("upheavals")
• By June 1996, team had been using custom development tools for some time. Check date against the request for dev tools from Bernie Stolar.
• Difficulties related to size and perspective in 3D environments and being an early 3D game
• Addition of reflex lens (early/Spring 96) sparked a renewed sense of inspiration in the developers
• Reflex lens chosen as a way to combat the game being too fast for satisfying, fast 3D platforming, by means of expanding the visible play area on-screen
• Ofer Alon's custom dev tools
• Backgrounds were originally "flat backdrops" but team had plans to implement two-layer parallax scrolling
• "Coffin" (probably the actual Coffin here) used SoftImage for animations and Silicon Graphics workstations for rendering the characters. Might be Senn but probably Coffin.
• PC Editor. "Everything done on the PC editor perfectly translates to the Saturn" ahuh.
• Around June/Spring 95: About 15 ppl on dev team
• Mike Wallis says he joined Sega about 18 months prior to May 1996 interview. Check dates against this.
• Set to take advantage of both Saturn's processors, "both VDP1 and VDP2", "three 32-bit chips"
• Goddard recalls Dave Sanner may have been involved with X-treme's later iterations.
• August 96: Stolar reveals 3D Blast Sat to Wallis and offers to make him producer on it. He manages development teams in the US, Japan, and Europe to bring out the Saturn version later that October.
• May 96: "Core team" streamlined further, removing 1/3 of team (now being led by Senn) This is when Senn moved into SoA offices and did the 16-18 hr shifts (June-Aug) in an attempt to move mainbranch into Condor.
• 5-8 minutes of estimated gameplay time per world
• Upon cancellation's, about 80% of X-treme's main gameplay worlds were textured and close to completion.
• August: Supersick date. "I took on far more than was healthy... and after 2 years I became extremely ill... a nurse told me he thought I had 6 months to live, actually. I lost 25 pounds, was sick all the time, had cramps... and still went in to work... all due to too much stress" man this implies Senn was working himself dry for much longer than his SoA-live-in period.
• Game Fan Online, 1996-08-23: Cancellation announcement
• During creation of Alon's editor, Senn spoke with him about 3 hrs a day on how to do so. Existing videos only showcase a fraction of its abilities.
• Ofer's engine (and/or editor?) took one year to create.
• While Senn got along with Alon, he recalls them getting into disagreements about design, which disrupted his creative vision when having to defer to Alon's choices. Senn wouldn't know what the engine's restrictions were when imagining its gameplay. Once he got his hands on Alon's editor, he adapted quickly.
• By end of the project, many other staff had learned how to use the editor's basic functions, but only Senn and Wheeler knew the program entirely. Editor was changing frequently during development and difficult to teach.
• IMPORTANT: Around this time, the POV branch happened, and Senn/Alon started doing their own "eventual PC game" PC branch team. POV and mainbranch were stuck using an old version of the editor, while Alon kept updating the editor for his private Senn/Alon PC thing.
• IMPORTANT: Senn/Alon-exclusive PC engine featured the "dynamically-animating" snakey paths seen in late demos. This engine was used up until SegaSoft turned down funding the game.
• MOVE TO POV: POV unable to achieve mainbranch's fisheye
• "Game" coded in C, C++, Assembly
• HARDWARE LIST: "PC" (Windows 95?) , Macintosh, Amiga 3000, SGI workstations
• SOFTWARE LIST: DeluxePaint Animator, Photoshop, Imagine, Studio MAX, Alias/Wavefront, possibly Strata3D.
• Named feature list: World Display, Sonic Interaction, World Construction, World Rotation, Fish-Eye Lens, Dynamic Spline Paths
• Senn: "(Alon's) engine and tool was built with so much thought put into it, that it could be used for many games."
• Senn speculates management held Ofer to unfair expectations, being hyped up and expensive to hire, but choosing to work from home. Senn attributed this to Alon's preference of isolating himself as a programmer to avoid distractions. Despite maintaining a consistent 16 hours a day, 7 day a week workweek dedicated soley to coding for the game, Senn thinks management likely viewed his absence from the actual office as laziness or vacationing.
• "The meeting in which management informed Ofer and I that Robert Morgan was going to be taking over as programming lead to work with an outside company (POV) had the security guard outside - but this was not kicking Ofer off the team. It was putting someone else above him. Understandably, after working so hard, then seeing what POV had created without his knowledge, combined with the fact that management believed this was a better option was a big blow to Ofer's ego, showed his work no respect, and basically flipped him the bird. ... I honestly don't remember what happened with Ofer business-wise after this."
• Senn and Coffin both got supersick around the exact same time
• IMPORTANT: Senn identifies "Project Condor" as "the core team" that got moved into STI's old Redwood offices! Do things with this!
• Hirokazu suggested the game be for the Sat, not the 32X.
• On some level, SoJ was responsible for signing off on what SoA did with X-treme.
• Coffin described by Senn as "a wild stallion" who had difficulty taking direction, "but when unleashed did great stuff". Senn says her lack of experience in the game industry resulted in issues with her thinking about design ideas in the long-term. Because of how much she was now carrying Condor (and the project as a whole), management put pressure on her to deliver the game, resulting in her moving into SoA offices for long shifts, overworking herself so badly she grew seriously ill, and having to stop entirely - a situation mirrored by Chris Senn. (misgendered ref)
• Senn/Alon actually did make it in time for Iri's visit, but after Senn saw his severe disappointment, he didn't bring it up for fear of making things worse.
• IMPORTANT: Senn says he wasn't a part of Condor, nor the handful of people that moved into "another building" to work in isolation. After him talking about putting himself in isolation to work on the PC port. There were the 255 and 275 offices. Condor got 275. Alon was mostly work from home, and Senn implies he worked from home during this period too. When did he move in? And was it 255?
• One of Senn's animations (unsure if it still exists) is a mock-up of a bonus stage idea conceptualized by Kosaka.
• Patrick from Game Players visited around the time mag was published, during Senn's illness. When the magazine visited, he could barely keep himself from vomiting.

“	"I went to the exec producer and VP and told them the only way we had any semblance of hope of finishing this game for Christmas was to give me the reins, get rid of the political crap, isolate a core team, and give us the tools necessary to get the job done. SOA/STI management agreed, we pulled a core group of 4 artists, 2 programmers (+ 1 contractor), and 3 designers into the old STI location and we get to work."	„
— Producer Mike Wallis

Point Of View branch

“	"Somewhere between six and eight months prior to the project’s cancellation, management had investigated outside options to help insure completion of the game. They chose a company called ‘POV’. The effort was led by the Technical Director Robert Morgan, one of the original founders of POV, without the knowledge of Ofer Alon (or Christian Senn). When ready, management brought both Ofer and Senn into an office and unveiled their new plan to finish the game. The plan included removing Ofer as technical lead of the project and shifting technical control over to Robert Morgan, who would lead POV. Management presented POV’s efforts on-screen which included a computer monitor with an animating Sonic sprite fixed on-screen, a ground plane with a checkerboard texture on it, and a shaded sphere floating in the sky - without interaction of any kind."	„
— Designer Chris Senn

• One day, Senn and Alon invited into Morgan's office, where they learn about POV for the first time. This should be the same meeting with the security guard, and where Alon was "replaced" as head lead programmer w/e and "demoted" to "lead" just programmer. Senn considered it backstabbing and drastic. Their "hope" for success was a POV demo: "They showed us the Sonic sprite we were already using floating in the upper-right of the screen, a checkerboard ground, a rotating shaded polygonal shape floating in the air and maybe a ring sprite animating." When an SoA rep sensed the pair's astonishment and tried to frame the unimpressive demo as the start of something larger by saying, "We're on a mission...", Alon walked out of the meeting and said "have a nice trip."
• Senn says the POV demo more than insulted the two, as Ofer's engine already boasted a sizable featureset, and it surprised the pair to learn this was done without discussing it with them. Even more surprising was the plan to move forward with POV's engine. While management tried to explain the plan was to use POV's "technology" to simply port Ofer's PC engine to the Saturn, Senn feels this "trivialized the complexity of Ofer's technology and proved there was a very different understanding of what was involved to port the existing technology."

• Alon responsible for engine, editor, world rotation, reflex lens, others, and worked all day and night (largely from home) coding for the game, but was generally referred to as "just another programmer" by management. Compounded with above for reasons he left.
• IMPORTANT: Above reason is why standalone PC version was established: Senn and Alon were so disgusted with SOA's management, they would develop their own PC version and blow their expectations out of the water.
• It was rumored that Robert Morgan withheld a development kit Ofer needed to translate his PC work to the Saturn, so Ofer would "fail" and Robert could use a company that he co-founded to become the "savior" of the project
• Robert Morgan: "Programming lead" for POV
• Senn/Alon made 4 worlds with 50 enemies on the PC. Initially ported in-house to Sat but struggled to get engine running faster than few fps. STI tech dir. Robert Morgan decided to take Senn/Alon engine (the PC code) to POV in hopes to take another swing at a Sat version, but hopefully optimized. (ref? Playing?)
• Reportedly "led" by Robert Morgan as well
• "a very rudimentary version (and based on an old version of Ofer's editor)"
• This was the version of X-treme showed to Iri in Mar 96 alongside Condor
• Senn on POV: "based on a much older game engine with many new project recruits who were just learning the tools and what the game was all about"
• Iri's dislike is pretty much what canned POV's involvement

Project Condor branch

• Coffin's circular boss arenas were directly inspired by the circular boss fight in Gunstar Heroes. The team liked her idea and agreed to incorporate it, but as they were still learning how to program for the Saturn (compounded by the Sat being hard to code for), development of what would become Condor took longer than expected.
• Coffin was often left to work alone for long times, dedicated herself solely to programming.
• The "green valley" test level in the dumped ver of Condor had more features than what was dumped. There were enemies and prerelease screenshots show Sonic appearing to bounce on Mushroom Hill Zone mushrooms.
• Jason Kuo designed boss levels.
• Coffin ("programmer within STI" not on main team, i.e. Condor not mainbranch) "hacking together some quick demos" to appease execs (might be misremembered from "which appeased the execs")
• Light-sourcing (gourad) for Condor, such as in Fang's grenade.
• Condor had real-time gourad lighting except for Sonic's pupils which were a 4bit texture
• Engine "looks NiGHTS-ish" due to Coffin's use of contrasting-colored backlights for each light-shaded source (done on the DSP, likely limited to about 3) to help Sonic from looking flat
• Also looks NiGHTSish for these reasons and these reasons. Coffin attributes this as one of the sources of the "NiGHTS engine" rumor.
• At least two versions of the bonus game builds (not Condor as a whole) were shown publicly: an earlier one where Sonic (and other things?) lack light-shading, and a later one where he has shading.
• Fully 3D (and not prerendered) models of Sonic found in "the SDK" (SGL or a dumped version of X-treme) were a creation of Coffin's, from her older version of "the Sonic game" (likely an early Condor). "they demonstartated the rendering trick 'bug' where if you collapse opposite points of a saturn quad you get a triangle with one edge that's collapsed in and smoothly concave in screenspace at the pixel level."
• ALL THE REST OF THIS THREAD'S TECH INFO
• "After extreme I worked on R&D and assisted SoA/SoE/SoJ developer support regarding the saturn hardware so these discoveries were passed on and implemented in some late generation 3rd party titles and 1st party works like burning rangers so the time invested in xtreme did not feel like a total loss."
• In reference to 3D model of SGL/whatever Sonic: it was modeled by artist/designer kunitake aoki (who was working on Dynamite Deka at the time)
• (The dumped Condor proto?) is a very old "tester app", with most of the game's source code removed (as Coffin designed it to be tweakable on the fly, to combat the slow speed of traditionally using a CD emulator). Described as nothing more than a "little sandbox" for Sonic to run around in.
• Three bosses were programmed for Condor: Fang, Metal Sonic, and an "evil Sonic clone". All 3 had "reasonably-polished" AI before cancellation. A 4th boss was a "dumb" ai which operated similarly to early-zone boss fights in the MD Sonic games, and required far fewer resources. May have been the "Gemstone" boss.
• Support for the RAM cartridge was never seriously looked into for Condor, as Coffin knew the tight development schedule wouldn't have time to fit in the extra time required.
• Coffin tested Condor with the 3D Analog pad, and it reportedly played "so much better". She pushed for the game to even require the controller altogether, but this does not seem to have panned out.
• Chris Coffin says her main competition and inspiration was the boss engine in NiGHTS.
• Coffin was in correspondence with Yuji Naka during development, who reportedly "didn't get along" with her/the team/the game
• Coffin hardcoded a value of 21 lives for earlier non-gameplay focused versions of Condor, alongside an automatically-increasing life counter for press photo purposes.
• Coffin's music choice for Condor were tracks from the JP version of Sonic CD's OST, used as placeholders while X-treme's music was being composed.
• "The initial design for mecha sonic and fang bosses were such that only one big projectile was active at any moment" for more impressive lighting effects Fang had a grenade, what was Metal Sonic's?
• Condor Gourad shading was baked in
• Condor used the Sega Graphics Library, which the game was running on for its E3 96 appearance.
• "Back when" the boss engine was using sprites for Sonic (?), Harris agreed to a request by Coffin to modify the digitized sprite into one of Amy (for use in the boss engine). "It only took a couple days work to model the new shoes,eyes and ribbon and render all the sprite frames out." Having Amy in the game was not Senn's original plans, but something pursued by Coffin, figuring if the game was set to feature multiple playable characters, Amy would be the easiest to prototype. (Research date on this)
• SONIC POOL: Plans to include STI Burbank's Pool because art style matched pretty closely to Condor. "The technique they used to rendered sonic was very different looking than the polygon sonic approved for xtreme so the plan was to use everything from that minigame except their 'sonic'" (referring to Adrian Stephens' sphere-rendering engine)
• SONIC POOL: That bug model is one of the only known remnants of Stephen's sphere engine(!) Sonic Saturn looked like a more advanced Ballz 3D with some VDP-1 polygon support.
• SONIC POOL: Coffin/Condor never actually received Pool's source code, just their art assets. Both Condor's version of the sphere-rendering engine (doesn't appear in existing screenshots) and Pool's actual gameplay programming were recreated by Coffin for Condor.
• SONIC POOL: ADD EVERYTHING FROM THIS. This is where the remainder of Pool's unsourced info comes from(!) Probably nothing more here, but google Morawiec's responses to ensure this isn't copied from an earlier interview.
• SONIC POOL: Another ref for them being separate projects

SonicPC (?)

• Created somewhere between 94-95 when Alon ported his Mac engine code to "PC" to continue development. Intention was to port this later ver. of mainbranch engine to Sat, but this never happened. Was pitched to Sega Entertainment (SegaSoft?) but passed on, ending both developer's involvement with the project.
• This was also the version that the two tried to show Iri on his visit. Senn caught up to the group but was fearful of upsetting Iri further and didn't ask him to wait for Alon to arrive. By the time he did, motherboard slung under his arm, Iri had already left.
• At some point, the two-man Alon Senn team took the smooth-running mainbranch version (but specifically the PC version used to develop the potential Sat version), cleaned up 3-4 levels with enemies and such, and pitched it to Sega Entertainment (Sega's PC group). The person running this group, "Greg Swoarez" (Greg Suarez), refused to invest money in the project, as the division was really only comfortable with ports of existing games.
• Alon engine ready for game production, but with only four Senn-created worlds that were 60% complete at best, Senn estimates it would have taken the two of them about six months to complete the game.
• Senn speculates that PC version was turned down due to SegaSoft's lack of budget for such a title for the PC, or possibly as a result of the design being previously rejected by Iri (meaning SegaSoft could get in trouble for going against an SoJ head).
• IMPORTANT: POV, and the shitty meeting Senn/Alon experienced, is why standalone PC version was established: Senn and Alon were so disgusted with SOA's management, they would develop their own PC version and blow their expectations out of the water.

Prerelease

Pre-E3

• Uses pre-rendered graphics
• Comparisons to BugMedia:GamePro83june1996pageunknown.jpg
• Promises that X-treme will not resemble BugMedia:GamePro83june1996pageunknown.jpg
• Press pointing out the game's emptiness
• Dev team referred to as "Sonic Team"
• Doubts over reflex lens, but developers saying reflex lens takes "about 30sec of adjustment"
• Developer passion
• Section on RSD and it basically being an SoA marketing script.
• Should cost less than $54 (a speculative reseller ad says $45Media:SonicXtremeAdvertisement2.jpg)
• Majority of prerelease material comes from SoA-distributed videotape

E3 1996

• Announced at E3 1996 "to thunderous applause"
• E3 96 prerelease party: Sega Rocks the House of Sonic Blues, held at HoB LA. Attended by members of AM2, and SOA+SE execs. Sonic gave away "golden rings" and Sonic tattoos to partygoers. Uses X-treme's (marketing campaign's) Sonic render with a vague "Sonic" theme, but the only press coverage we have of this event doesn't mention X-treme at all. Either the same boss engine that was playable at E3 was playable here, or the E3 setup was (somehow) finicky and it was kept an E3-only game.
• X-treme as the answer to Mario 64, "potential to do battle with", "will be its main competition" and "a worthy competitor to"
• E3 appearance was a timed "bonus round" where "you constantly run around in circles" with pretty lighting and trails of colored light following Sonic, and was high-framerate and smooth. Another mag says "full of bugs"
• Two "E3 promo" videos exist. One consisting solely of gameplay, and one with a live-action Mario parody interspersed with gameplay of X-treme and 3D Blast MD. At least one played at the show.
• Unenthusiastic press
• Was reportedly 20% complete at E3 appearance
• Fall release date ref
• No known plans to release the game in Japan
• Magazines disliking fisheye
• "Complete absence of crowds around the X-treme booth" due to "lack of anything playable"
• E3 promo video unimpressive
• No playable public demos outside of Condor at E3
• X-treme had two E3 appearances: public booth on the show floor, and "private" showing in Sega's dedicated press backroom (that one video)

Post-E3

• Naka reportedly had multiple interviews where he spoke poorly of the project
• Following E3 appearance, Irimajiri's visit became an "open secret" within the industry
• Since E3 appearance, game received little press
• Last appearance and possibly last official press info: Sega Gamer's Day 1996
• September 9, 1996 cancellation rumor ("put on hold indefinitely") citing Irimajiri's visit and quality concerns.
• September 18, 1995 cancellation announcement citing gameplay not suiting Sonic's style. They speculate the engine could be used in a future game.
• Another cancellation announcement and another and another.
• Speculation Naka was involved in the game's cancellation
• Sonic 3D Sat as replacement for X-treme
• Irimajiri's visit as reason for cancellation
• Quality concerns/"not suiting Sonic" as reason for cancellation

Legacy

“	"This game went through many iterations, working titles, team members, and target platforms. Its 3 year life cycle attempted to boldly go where no person had gone before, at least with a Sonic game. It failed to finish and reach market, but has had far-reaching implications on my career and has had a surprising effect on a number of interested fans. Sonic is quite a brand, and one I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to work on, especially at such a young age."	„
— Designer Chris Senn

• Ofer Alon requested that Senn not share in-game maps/screenshots based on his engine on SXC, because he believes it would be unethical to share code potentially owned by Sega.
• Senn says X-treme had a roughly 3 year development cycle.
• Senn: "The team changed hands so many times as did the target platform for the game, making a collective vision for the game an inevitable impossibility."
• The whole "Sonic Lost World takes inspiration from X-treme" thing probably doesn't need to be covered, but if so, Senn words it well here.
• Senn doubts that X-treme, even had it been released, would have been able to live up to consumer standards for a Sonic game, or even been fun to play.
• Wallis says Coffin made duplicates of her build. I know she contributed something software to all that noise but was she the original source for the ver of Condor we have? She herself says she didn't really develop on CD-R too frequently, but this needs research. Wallis also reportedly has a box full of design documents and project notes, AND a copy of some version of X-treme itself.
• Goddard thinks he has "code for a demo or two" from the 32X era of X-treme, as well as a promotional "billboard".
• Roger Hector says X-treme was just one of the STI projects which suffered from political tensions between Sega of Japan and Sega of America.
• 2006 "auction"
• Senn doesn't/never had protos.
• In ref to Condor protos: "I rarely did testing with cd's so if there's any more cd's out there, their contents will most likely be small modules of the game like that one. Burning cd's back then waas a huge pain and really slowed production down. By working mainly with code that had compiled in assets, adding more programmers to the project was eaiser, this gave them a starting to point to familiarize themselves with parts of the source, make modifications and see what their changes would influence more easily so their iteration time was better as well."
• SoA "rep" says some design ideas and art were later used in/inspired elements of Sonic R.Media:GameProUnknownIssuePage42.jpg (This article seems post-cancellation, but also seems to have been written within the following years. Probably don't use this as an original source outside for the SoA rep thing.)
• Alon's tools were considered to be used in a potential X-treme follow-up
• Note on Coffin's misgendering section in that RSD correctly attributes her SGL work to her, adding to confusing.
• Naka cancelling Sonic Saturn is likely source of Naka cancelling X-treme rumor, but needs research.
• IMPORTANT: Wallis contradicts his Pachuka interview and says the Genesis version of 3D Blast was always in development, and wasn't a last-minute idea to replace X-treme. Given the previous information, this is the more likely case.
• Peter Morawiec and STI Burbank being aware of X-treme and confirming they are different projects To address Legacy speculation that they were the same.