Back in the mid 90s Sega Technical Institute was developing a 3D Sonic game for the Sega Saturn entitled Sonic X-treme. Initially scheduled for a holiday 1996 release, the game was eventually cancelled following a flurry of development issues. Yet some dedicated fans at SonicRetro managed to acquire the source code for the original demo and have polished it up to a playable build that you can download today.
Bear in mind that this is taken from an early build where rings couldn't be collected. So far the Sonic X-treme demo only covers one level, but more stages are expected to come based on the recovered files.
In order to get the game to run on modern hardware, the Sonic fans behind this had to tweak the engine a bit. "We would also like you to know that this is an almost as is port of the engine," the developers explained. "A snapshot in time if you will."
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