How Sonic 3 & Knuckles failed to meet its Go Live date
Sonic 3 & Knuckles (1994)
Sonic 3 & Knuckles (1994)
Now that I’ve nestled my career within the vast cargo pants of Information Technology, I have found myself tasked with leading all sorts of projects and deployments and integrations. I’m not a project manager, but I do manage projects. This is what us IT bods refer to as “wearing many different hats.”
Here’s how it all goes down: somewhere, sometime, somehow, a salesperson has beaten a potential client’s door down, and persisted at it long enough to finally push the client’s decision-makers into a heartbreaking decision to buy the software. “OK, we’ll take your product,” they whimper, knowing that they were damned either way – their fate would be either death by their CEO, or death by a thousand sales emails.
In a bid to salvage some control of the situation, the client stakeholders will later call the sales team’s bluff, and begin making all sorts of demands. Automation? Yep, we want that. A dedicated support package? Absolutely! Go Live three days before yesterday? That has to be guaranteed, or we’re not going ahead, even though we both know it’s too late.
To get the deal over the line, and perhaps be able to eat some food that month, the sales team just nod and agree to everything, no matter how ridiculous. The wretched client signs the dotted line, signing a few death warrants and future budget problems along with it, and a statement of work is drawn up. Then it lands on my desk and the fun begins.
I would wager that if you ran a search of all my emails, or even if you recorded all of my calls and were able to locate specific words, you’d find the word “unfortunately” in there, over and over again. It’d be like Graham’s number written out. And not just “unfortunately” either, I’m constantly using words and phrases like “limitations”, “coming down the line” and “this is the best we can do”.
Gosh, I really do disappoint customers on a regular basis. The sales videos make it look so easy, you know? But then the client makes some perfectly reasonable request, and it suddenly exposes a major fault in the whole system.
The result is a total collapse, and I’m left with my head in my hands, having to explain why we accidentally slaughtered all their end users. “Unfortunately, there’ll be bank balance limitations coming down the line for me. Chewing gum for lunch is the best I can do.”
When we do embark on a project, the client’s “vision” (a nonsense phrase up there with “mission statement”) is of a sun-kissed vista, with children playing, birds chirping, a babbling brook nearby and everything moving along harmoniously. They spend eye-watering sums of money for this type of promise.
Six months down the line, it’s time to Go Live. And inevitably, I end up delivering… well, rather than give you a full description, just think of the cheapest, grimmest city hotel you’ve been to, and try to remember the view out the window. That’s what I give to the customer, plus a whole headache of support issues that neither of us had ever banked on.
Cripes, it’s not for want of trying - I really do my best to deliver. But no matter how much forecasting and planning and Gantt charts and mutual masturbation you undertake at the start of the endeavour, these projects can just spiral wildly out of control.
That’s why I had to laugh and sympathise with the guys at Sega, when I read the story about how Sonic the Hedgehog 3 got so big during its development that they took the decision to split it out into two games. No other solution would work, seemingly - it had to be two games, and that was it.
Now, I do get the impression that project management was a lot more casual back in 1993/94. But I’m just picturing a massively stressed out Sega of Japan development studio, and I must wonder how desperate they must have been to come to that crazy, unprecedented decision. Cue the next planning discussion, or whatever the mid 90s equivalent of a scrum was:
“Ahm… that sequel we were making, the one we need on the market very soon to keep the Sonic craze going strong? Well, we got a bit too big for our boots, sir.”
The ‘sir’ in question, a monster of a man, picture a Japanese Tyson Fury, presses something underneath the table that sounds awfully like the click of a revolver. “Go on…”
“We’re proposing that we split Sonic 3 in half, and one of the cartridges will actually plug into the other one to give players the full experience. Or, they can be bought and enjoyed separately…”
And I really don’t know what happened next. Did the CEO want to throw these buffoons out the window there and then, and have done with them? Or did he rejoice, and give them a most uncharacteristic kiss, thanking them for their genius at gouging two prices of entry out of the consumer? Whatever about that, the really crazy thing is how well it actually worked for them.
Here we are, then. Sonic 3 & Knuckles may have cost gamers double whack in 1994, when the fastest thing alive finally met Go Live. But my word - what a step forward. People talk about games that stretch their hardware to the limit, but it gets taken to new levels here.
There is something quite wild about seeing this Frankengame sticking out of your console, as if the whole thing is working independently of the Mega Drive itself, and the dormant console is gonna wake up in a visceral panic any second now. You know that bit in Kill Bill when the mosquito starts going ham on The Bride and she bolts awake screaming? Ah, never mind.
It’s probably fair to say that both Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic & Knuckles were released a little too late in the Mega Drive’s life to get the classic recognition that Sonic 2 did – that particular game was an event in itself. But with its massive levels, its wide variety of music, its nice little story brilliantly told, and its better graphics, S3&K has everything it needs to be an all-time great.
My two favourite aspects of this game is how each of the diverse Zones has two different pieces of music, and they also have end-of-level transitions. How, for example, did Sonic immediately go from Emerald Hill to Chemical Plant in the previous game? That one kept us all up at night, but you need wonder this type of thing no more - now you can watch the poor bugger fall off Robotnik’s Flying Battery, and land in the infinite dunes of Sandopolis. How funky is that?
And those two Zones that I’ve mentioned are just two out of fourteen. There are save files as well, a true novelty on Sega Mega Drive, as well as multiple endings. There’s even a two-player mode, although Sonic 2 had this as well and arguably that one was better. In Sonic 3 & Knuckles, multiplayer is a strange 5-lap race through five tiny areas. Five laps, five areas, and probably five minutes of fun.
Do you know what’s best of all, though? This game had certain music tracks composed by Michael Jackson himself. Can you believe that? I’d love to go into more detail about him soon, possibly when I finally get round to giving the Moonwalker game a spin.
Keep in mind now, you’re not gonna get Sonic cruising down through the hills and dales while Billie Jean plays. We’re on about that mid-1990s MJ, when he’d gotten quite a bit paler. I’ll put it a more direct way: have you ever heard the Michael Jackson song Jam? Or Stranger in Moscow? I thought not.
Well, it’s a good thing that the quality of early Sonic games was so high that it justified the purchase of both these games. Of course, these days you can acquire Sega Mega Drive games for nothing, except a bit of time spent downloading. And you might even be forced to do this, because re-releases of this title have been pretty sparse, likely due to the King of Pop’s involvement.
But do yourself a favour here and get this game by any means possible, because this is the best that early Sonic games get. Sonic 1 scores the classic points. Sonic 2 is the most fondly remembered. But Sonic 3 & Knuckles, if it’s fair enough to take the two cartridges as one title, represents the crest of the 16-bit Sonic wave, before it broke into a backwash of 3D mediocrity.
24 January 2025