Sonic the Hedgehog is no stranger to showing up on new consoles. Ever since Sega quit the console-making business at the turn of the century, there are few major platforms the blue blur hasn’t made an appearance on. Even so, one programmer is making it possible to play the very first Sonic the Hedgehog game on a console few would’ve ever dreamed of playing it on: the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.
The thought alone might seem almost heretical for those who grew up in the early 1990s, back when the great console wars between Nintendo and Sega were at their fiercest. As weird as it might be to imagine Sonic’s 1991 Sega Genesis debut running on the very console it was made to compete against, a programmer known as TiagoSC made it a bit easier recently by posting a tech demo for a SNES port of the game online.
The current demo only showcases the third stage of Green Hill Zone, but that’s enough to show the promise here. What makes it stand out from other Sonic fan projects is that TiagoSC’s port is based on actual Sonic code (provided by engine disassemblies of the original games from fan site SonicRetro), which they then mixed with customizations designed to optimize it for the SNES.
Given the considerable differences between the Genesis and the SNES’s hardware, the result isn’t an exact one-for-one recreation. As Eurogamer notes, having played it, the demo sports a reduced view of the level during gameplay, while sprites are half their usual sizes, which forces the game to load in more to compensate, straining the CPU in the process. Despite these issues, the demo nails the key parts of the game’s smooth gameplay, that being the speed of the level-scrolling and how Sonic moves, resulting in a sample of Sonic the Hedgehog that feels nearly identical to its original release.
While it would be neat to see TiagoSC port the rest of the game, it looks like the demo is just a proof of concept for developing a SNES game engine capable of running speedy games like Sonic the Hedgehog. That will probably disappoint fans who happen to own SNESs, but at the very least, it lets one imagine what it would’ve been like if Sonic was a multiplatform character from the start.
Also, for anyone wondering how the SNES port replicates the Genesis’ “Blast Processing” technology, Eurogamer points out that, while Blast Processing was real and not just a marketing term Sega used, it was never actually utilized for any title that shipped for the console, Sonic included.
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