Original Sonic 3D Developer to Produce ‘Director’s Cut’ Patch

Jon Burton, the founder of Travellers’ Tales (aka TT Games) and one of the original developers of Sonic 3D: Flickies’ Island, has announced that he is working on a ‘Director’s Cut’ version of the action platformer first released in 1996.

The reveal was made on Burton’s new YouTube channel GameHut, which has grown in popularity in recent weeks thanks to some insightful material concerning the development of some of the UK game studio’s early projects – including Sonic R, Sonic 3D, Mickey Mania and Toy Story.

The Director’s Cut of Sonic 3D Flickies’ Island (also known as Sonic 3D Blast in North America) will include a number of coding tweaks, enhancements and new features. Among them, Burton promised that he would be taking a look at reworked controls, alternative level design, the inclusion of Super Sonic and a prototype crab enemy that never made it into the final game, an updated options screen and a password save function.

Burton also said he wanted to include a recently-revealed (but ultimately scrapped) Level Editor mode that was originally used to help coders plot out enemy and item placements during development. You can see a video of this in action via the video below.

While this is pretty exciting news, Burton was keen to stress that he would be working on this ‘Director’s Cut’ in his spare time, and would be limiting his project to a re-coding of the original game. So don’t go expecting any updated graphics or crazy new gameplay features. The reworked version will come in the form of a ‘patch’ which players will be able to implement into their existing copies of the game – Burton was careful to avoid specifics, but we can assume this will mean that the patch will suit a ROM of the Mega Drive original.

We’ll be keeping an eye on this one – if you’ve not checked it out yet, be sure to give the GameHut YouTube channel a watch, there’s lots of great 16-bit stuff in there.

Via SSMB