Following on from the weeks earlier news that a playable build of Sonic X-Treme had been discovered, there has been a significant update. Sonic Retro member CoolJerk who has been instrumental in the week’s progress has released a small statement regarding what’s happened and what’s going on from now on.
The long and short of it. This Sonic X-Treme copy is real, it is the game which was so near release, it’s been found and it’s in the possession of people who are in the process of trying to restore it to a functional state.
Now for the not so good news.
This process is going to take a VERY long time. If you were thinking ‘I’ll get to play this soon,’ get that idea out of your head. You will be waiting months if not years before you can play this, if indeed it can be reverse engineered to a universal state. There is a ton of work to be done and remember, these guys are doing this out of a hobby, not a job.
Now for the really interesting news… CoolJerk also had this to say.
Now, the craziest part – 4 months after the final build we have from Ofer, we have another build from POV of a never before seen Sonic title for the saturn. We don’t think this title has ever been shown off or mentioned before. We don’t even know what it looks like yet because we can’t build it until the environment is complete. But there is likely at least one more major surprise in this find.
What does this mean? It means that at one point, Sonic X-treme was to look like a completely different game, it didn’t look like all those screenshots or small video clips that have been leaked over the years, it looked like something else entirely. Not a new Sonic game, but a new direction for Sonic X-Treme.
Also, and I must stress, do not go around bugging these people, this will take a long time to complete, harassing these guys will not get it done faster, you will have to be patient and wait.
Full statement is over at Sonic Retro.