Sega Axes Sonic 3 & Knuckles from Latest Collection, Lies About Reason (Updated Again)

We hate to point out when a company like Sega doesn’t tell the truth. It really pains us to have to call them liars. But, today, they told a really big and obvious one.

Sega today noted on their blog that their upcoming title, Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection for Xbox 360, will lack both Sonic 3 & Knuckles, as well as Sonic 2 & Knuckles. These two games were achieved on the original Sega Genesis, by using the Lock-On Technology, which allowed the Sonic & Knuckles game to be combined with Sonic 2 or Sonic 3.

The outsourced developer for the game claims that the sacrifice had to be made, due to the complexity of the technology… in order to launch the game on time. However, the hacking community proved over a decade ago that Lock-On Technology is nothing more than combining two ROM files properly, when viewed in an emulator. As such, there is no technical reason that Sonic 2 & Knuckles, as well as Sonic 3 & Knuckles, would require any added development time to include in the game.

Worse for Sega, their blog team vouched for the statements by echoing them on their own blog.

About the only thing Sega can do at this point to apologize for lying to the community, would be to offer the two pairings for free via an Xbox Live Update for the game. Many are speculating that the two games are actually being held in reserve, to be offered as add-on Downloable Content, for a fee from the Xbox Live store. If Sega does do this, after lying to the community about their reasoning, they are turning their backs on their most loyal customers.

From everyone at CentralGadget.com, we cannot urge them enough to rectify this blatant lie which is being perpetuated upon the community.

Update: Others have pointed out that Sega already proved themselves wrong about this over a decade ago. The Sega PC game Sonic 3 & Knuckles Collection tapped a modified KGEN emulator, complete with emulating the Lock-On Technology. We still are not clear as to why Sega would argue that there is any technical problem emulating an 8 MB Genesis ROM file, as opposed to a 4 MB one… especially since they did it themselves on the PC a decade ago, and so has every Genesis emulator since.

We’d also like to point out that Sega made their own custom emulator for the Sega Saturn, via Sonic Jam… which even supported locking on Sonic 1 with Sonic & Knuckles for the infinite Special Stages. This is a clear-cut case of Sega trying to imagine that nobody in the community understands how a Genesis emulator works, and that makes it clear that they have lost touch with their most loyal customers.

Update 2: After a groundswell of support for our position, Sega media relations backed down, and is no longer blocking comments on the matter from being published. Many people’s comments were left as pending… preventing the public from seeing the full discussion on their blog.

However, Sega has yet to acknowledge that incorrect information was published on their blog, much less admit that they have known the information was wrong for over a day now.

Update 3: One commenter on Sega’s blog (GerbilSoft) really went the extra mile. Thinking ahead that Sega might change their argument, and claim the Xbox 360 disc was full, the commenter even wrote the code to enable lock-on technology without having to include the 8 MB ROM file. Emphasis on the commentary in the code itself.

“Hey Sega, want to figure out how to lock on the Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles ROMs without storing an extra 4MB ROM image? Here’s how!

/* Super amazing lock-on ROM functionality!
* This would take Sega over 9,000 hours to write,
* but any half-decent programmer could do it in 5 minutes! */

unsigned char ROM[0×400000]; // 4 MB ROM buffer.
FILE *sk = f open(”sonic_and_knuckles.bin”, “rb”); // open the Sonic & Knuckles ROM
fread(&ROM[0], 1, 0×200000, sk);
fclose(sk);
FILE *s3 = f open(”sonic_3.bin”, “rb”); // open the Sonic 3 ROM
fread(&ROM[0×200000], 1, 0×200000, sk);
fclose(s3);

Wow! Amazing! And it works, too! Perhaps you should hire better developers.”