Sonic Extreme: History and Key Facts

Sonic Extreme was a prototype video game created by Vision Scape Interactive in May 2003. Proposed as a spin-off to Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog series, Sonic Extreme featured Sonic and Shadow riding hoverboards in a Green Hill Zone-themed open world, with gameplay likened to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. It featured three gameplay modes, which included searching for keys and Chaos Emeralds and fighting or racing another player. Vision Scape created the prototype while it made cutscenes for Sonic Heroes (2003); it was developed on the Xbox with intent to port it to the GameCube and PlayStation 2. The prototype was assembled using the RenderWare game engine and assets from prior Vision Scape and Sonic games.

Vision Scape showed Sonic Extreme to Sonic Team head Yuji Naka, who was impressed and asked for a software design description to be submitted to Sega. However, Sega never responded to Vision Scape after the document was turned in. While the game never came to fruition, it may have served as the basis for Sonic Team's Sonic Riders (2006), which features similar gameplay concepts. The Extreme prototype publicly surfaced in May 2011, when gameplay footage was uploaded to YouTube. Journalists reacted negatively and expressed relief it was never released.

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from Sonic Extreme by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.