You could soon play the 3D Sonic game that never was

The mid 1990s were a pretty exciting time in the development of 3D in gaming. Thing is, one of gaming’s most established figures was missing. While Nintendo gave Mario a new lease on life with Super Mario 64 and Sony made Crash Bandicoot a household name, there was no sign of a certain hyperactive hedgehog. Until now that is.

You see, Sega had actually built a 3D Sonic game, it just never got around to actually releasing it. The game, which was set to be titled Sonic X-treme, was meant to be a showpiece for SEGA’s new Saturn console and was meant to take advantage of that year’s holiday rush.

As The Verge reports however, production troubles meant that the game was eventually pulled in 1997.

And it would’ve remained consigned to the vaults of history too were it not for the efforts of a group of die-hard fans. Thanks to them, anyone with a Windows machine can now see Sonic the Hedgehog is glorious 1990s 3D.

Of course, the game was never actually completed, so the product available for download is far more like a demo than a something that can be played the whole way through. That said, the developers continue to add more features and levels, polishing it up for modern PCs.

It’s a fascinating experiment in figuring out what could have been and the developers rightly call it “a snapshot in time.”