Sonic the Hedgehog Spinball (Genesis)

This page details one or more prototype versions of Sonic the Hedgehog Spinball (Genesis).

Sub-Page#

August 1993 PrototypeDumped by PREMIERE on 6 October 1993, but forgotten about until being rediscovered on a Chinese website. Despite being late in development, it is horrendously buggy.

Other Builds#

September 17th and October 19th, 1993 Builds#

Download Sonic Spinball (Genesis, Sept 17, 1993 Proto) File: Sonic Spinball (Sept 17, 1993 Prototype).bin (1.00 MB) (info)

Two late PAL builds. They're identical.

• The introduction still lacks many sound effects.
• The jingle for opening the sewer lids in Toxic Caves is shortened in this version.
• Robotnik's ship during the destruction animation debris switches to the wrong palette partway through. This happens in the final as well, but is more noticeable here.

Near-Final Build#

Download Sonic Spinball (Genesis, Near-Final Build/Oct 12–13, 1993 Proto) File: Sonic Spinball (Near-Final Build).bin (1.00 MB) (info)

This build was released on October 12–13, 1993. As it's nearly identical to the released game, it's often mistaken for the first US release, but there's no evidence it was ever on a retail cart. It contains a few differences:

• The Level Select code does not work.
• Losing a ball still displays "LOSER" instead of "YOU LOSE".
• Remixes of the Sonic 1 main and Game Over themes are used in those places here.

The Sonic 1 tunes were very quickly replaced by different, hastily-composed new themes because Sega doesn't actually own much of the music from Sonic 1 and apparently hadn't licensed it for Spinball. According to artist Craig Stitt, this fact was revealed by Hirokazu Yasuhara during the game's wrap party, to which composer Howard Drossin "quickly ran to his little room and began composing a new piece of music". The final version of the game was built at "around midnight that night", and released thereafter.