Long-Lost High Quality ‘Sonic and the Secret Rings’ Gameplay Videos From 2006 Re-Discovered

E3 2006 was a crazy-exciting time for Sonic for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest was the blue blur’s first run on Nintendo’s Wii console. Sonic and the Secret Rings was an interesting new style of platformer, and so there was a lot of interest in its reveal. Now, we’ve managed to find some long-lost videos of the game’s first-ever gameplay from E3 2006 – check them out!

These videos are the HD 1280×720 files from IGN’s Insider programme, originally published during the mid-2000s – we’ve been upscaling them to 4K60 (generic upscales, not the fancy AI ones) and you can watch them below.

Among them of course are the two HD off-camera, 2 minute each clips of Sonic and the Secret Rings (then called Sonic Wild Fire)’s Sand Oasis stage from E3 2006 (15 years ago, now you feel old). Sadly these are only decent-sized portions and not the entirety of the stage, so sadly you won’t see a crisp version of that not-so-subtle Sonic DS-referencing ending animation of Sonic doing a running thumbs up to the camera.

So what do you think of the quality of these videos? Hopefully someday a similar-quality video of the entire demo will surface, but sadly at best they’re vaguely 480p-quality (which for off-camera in 2006 was not that great, trust me, I’ve looked). Enjoy these in the meantime!