Sonic 3D Blast

When discussing the greatest games in the Sonic franchise, Sonic 3D Blast is seldom mentioned by anyone, and for rather good reason. The foray into exploring 3D platforming for the ‘hog was slow and strange; not really capturing the magic of those first few games in the series. Even so, it’s an enduring piece of gaming history, one filled with many secrets, some of which haven’t been widely known until recent times. Evidently, there’s an “Easter Egg” in the game that lets you see a hidden level select screen, which is bizarrely activated by physically smacking the cartridge, though it wasn’t necessarily put in the game intentionally.

Jon Burt of Traveller’s Tales recently posted a video explaining the story behind this feature, and it’s a bit humorous in nature. SEGA was known for being particularly heinous with its certification process; it would take weeks to approve games, and if any bugs or glitches were present, the whole process had to be started over. To get around this, Burt would disguise error messages as secrets in-game, in order to fool SEGA management into thinking the glitches were an intended part of the game. Thus, he created a spreadsheet that accounted for every possible error the game could run into, and programmed the game to default to the hidden level select screen when something went wrong. Here’s the video he made on it:

What do you think? Have you discovered this before? What’s your favorite, easily reproducible gltich in games? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

[source polygon.com]