Sonic’s history is a tale of high and lows, twists and turns, and lots of mysteries. Sonic’s Classic era particularly has been a constant gold mine of information and surprising stories. For example, SEGA Technical Institute once pitched a SEGA Genesis/Mega Drive spin-off game called “Treasure Tails”.
According to former SEGA Technical Institute artist Craig Stitt, who helped with the art for Sonic 2 and Spinball, the game was pitched in February 1993. It was supposed to be an isometric platform puzzle/adventure game, a spin-off title featuring Tails. but that’s all the info there is about the game.
That’s because the game didn’t seem to make it very far, if at all. There apparently isn’t even a physical game, as the only thing we have to go on visually are a few mock-up images from a 25 year old VHS tape that Stitt made.
And there’s another reason why we know so little about it. Because Stitt himself has said that “I had totally forgotten about it myself until recently re-watching a VHS resume I had put together in 1995, in preparation to leaving SEGA” and he’s admitted that he doesn’t even remember far the game got.
So, with Stitt having such a hard time remembering the game, he’s “curious if anybody has heard of this one before. I’d love it if someone had something that would shake a few memories loose from my head”. If anyone has information to share with him, especially if you worked on the game or may have been involved with SEGA at the time of the game’s release, get in contact with him and let him know!
Via SEGABits
Does anyone more versed in the canon of Genesis games know if those isometric sprites are from a pre-existing game, or if they were created specifically for this pitch? I’d say both explanations are equally likely.
Based on previous STI demos for the Sonic SATAM game and Comix Zone games, I would guess that this may have been a non-playable technical demo, rendered on an Atari ST or Amiga. I don’t recall what they used to develop those demo videos, but I seem to recall it being a 16-bit PC similar in specifications.
This is just an empirical guess on my part.
Now that you mention it, this whole thing is strangely similar to that canned SATAM game. Probably just a coincidence, but with so little information on this it’s truly impossible to tell. What a crazy can of worms!
This was done on SEGA’s proprietary hardware known as the Digitizer and was created just as static screens. Tails was problem just pulled from Sonic 2.
One correction to the info here. Bill Dunn did not work on this. For some reason I thought he did (in my original post of this) but I talked with him and he told me he didn’t have anything to do with it. (I was bummed because I was really hoping he would remember more than me.
Thanks for letting me know. I’ve updated the article to remove any mention of him. =)
Would have been really cool to have a Tails spin-off for the Genesis/Mega Drive.