i bet you could do a kickass video on sonic xtreme
I talk big about Sonic X-treme, but the truth of the matter is I kind of stopped paying attention to a lot of it after a while.
For those who don’t know, here’s the whole story:
Around 2000 or 2001, I was deep in to, like, The Secrets of Sonic Team and other websites that covered lost beta elements in Sonic games. This was right after the big Sonic 2 Beta discovery, and the Sonic community was working overtime documenting all kinds of discoveries and lost stuff from every Sonic game ever made up to that point...
...except Sonic X-treme. That information was fragmented and spread across the internet and nobody really seemed to care. I saw a niche I could fill, so I started up a website and combed the web looking for every scan, screenshot and video I could find. I collected all of it at a modest website that was something like sonicxtreme.tk or sonicxtreme.cjb.net or whatever. One of those free domain URLs.
And once I’d collected everything that could be found on Sonic X-treme... that was, uh, it. It’s not like there was anything more that I could do. Once I had all the magazine articles and screenshots of the game, I had reached a dead end on what that website could accomplish. I had completed the known snapshot of what was Sonic X-treme. And so it sat for like, a year. Maybe longer. Just gathering dust.
By now, people at in the community were making efforts to contact the English-speaking members of Sonic 2′s development team. People like Craig Stitt, Brenda Ross, so on and so forth. The Sega Technical Institute folks. And it dawned on me: the entire development staff for Sonic X-treme was American, weren’t they? With Sonic 2, they were stuck talking to artists who were trapped in the tunnel vision of only working on small, specific parts of the game. Brenda Ross could only speak about the couple levels she worked on, y’know? They couldn’t interview the larger members of Sonic Team directly -- they were celebrities, which made them hard to contact, and on top of that there was a language barrier. There were a lot of hurdles to cross, and many of them were borderline impossible.
But with Sonic X-treme, everything was way more accessible and local. So I started skimming the magazine scans I had. Ultra Gameplayers had run a monthly feature called “White Glove Diaries” about the development of the game, speaking to people who were working on it, and it was the best source of information for the game at the time. Within moments, I had a name: Mike Wallis, the game’s producer. Inside of maybe thirty minutes and some skillful Google searching later, I had an email address. It really was that easy.
I tried to be as polite and respectful as I could; I asked him if he was the same Mike Wallis that worked on Sonic X-treme and wondered if he would be willing to answer any questions.
The first thing he wrote back to me was “How did you find me?” along with confirmation that yes, he was that Mike Wallis.
The second thing he wrote back to me was “Would you be willing to speak over the phone?”
And I panicked. This guy was, at least to me, a pretty big deal. I was still deep in my pit of despair, so the idea of interviewing this guy rattled me. I couldn’t do it. I posted on on the Sonic hacking community forum, relaying my inability to go through with this thing. Here I was on the cusp of a big breakthrough and I was acting like a deer in the headlights. Leaped before I looked and got exactly what I wanted, at the cost of now feeling deeply over my head. I was in no way mentally prepared for this.
Somebody on the forum stepped forward and said he’d do the interview for me. His username was Pachuka, and he was gaining notoriety in the Sonic hacking community. Pachuka seemed confident and knew his way around the important terminology, so I figured sure, he can do it. We talked over IRC, ran through some questions we wanted to ask, set the whole thing up for the appointed phone call. We were a team.
The call happened and Pachuka recorded the whole thing. Said he’d release the MP3 on his new website, The Sonic-Cult.
I was incredibly nervous even just listening to the MP3 of the phone call. They’d have to mention me, right? Acknowledge my existence? Talk about how I set the call up? It was hard not to feel incredibly self-conscious.
The call opened with Mike Wallis referring to my website. And Pachuka... had no idea what he was talking about. He never mentioned me by name, and barely even acknowledged that he knew me. Heck, Mike Wallis seemed to know more about me than Pachuka did, and I’m the one who set the whole thing up for him.
Looking back in retrospect, I probably didn’t do that much. From getting the idea, to finding his email address and sending the email, contacting Mike Wallis took what was likely less than an hour’s work, and I was mainly following the example of others in the Sonic community. But in the moment, it felt like I had done a lot. This was as much my discovery as it was anyone else’s. I was the only person who cared enough to set this up. I ran a whole website about this stuff -- the only website for it on the entire internet. And yet, Pachuka couldn’t even remember my username. I felt worthless.
From then on, the community treated this as Pachuka’s discovery. It was his interview. He made the discovery. His star rose, and I remained a nobody. No one cared about my site. Sonic-Cult is where you went if you wanted to learn the real deal about Sonic X-treme.
With Mike Wallis on the line, Pachuka started contacting more people from Sonic X-treme’s development. Soon, that lead him to Chris Senn, and the floodgates were blown wide open. Chris Senn was the key to everything.
I was never a part of any of those conversations. Not even once. The whole community took off without me and I was left in the dust. The handful of screenshots and magazine scans I had collected now looked absolutely pitiful.
I paid attention to the information that came out, of course. I was still interested in the game, and I mirrored what I could on my site. But on the inside, it was hard not to feel hurt. I never looked at it with quite the fervor I once had. It wasn’t mine anymore. I let myself get scooped and the door was slammed in my face without so much as a “thank you.”
After that, the magic and mystery of Sonic X-treme wore off pretty quickly for me. As more and more and more concept drawings and videos and music files and sprites and everything else burst out of Chris Senn, my interest began to wane. It stopped being special.
Petty? On some level, maybe. But for a brief window of time, Sonic X-treme research felt like my baby. I was the guy you talked to about that. Why bother keeping up appearances when somebody else was getting patted on the back and now one of the game’s developers was practically uploading the entire design document to the internet? They apparently didn’t want me involved, so I took a hike.
Don’t get me wrong: it was my fault. I handed this to Pachuka on a silver platter, and he ran away with it. It was a decision that haunted me for years. Made me start realizing I needed to be more confident and less shy.
I am in no rush to relive that mistake.
So when it comes to Sonic 3, I could recite a lot of that from memory. When it comes to Sonic X-treme, I remember the details of the Mike Wallis interview and some basics that came from Chris Senn, but a lot of the finer details of that weren’t really committed to memory, because I didn’t pay super close attention to all of it. And where would you even go to fill in those blanks? Last I checked, The Senntient website isn’t what it used to be.
