Unofficial Sonic game Never Released
Before Sonic the Hedgehog became known for his sense of speed, he could have been known for teaching kids basic math and vocabulary. And in the era when Mario began teaching typing and geography…why not?
That’s the general idea behind Sonic’s Edusoft. The edutainment title made well before Sonic’s Schoolhouse was originally a 1991 game being developed for the Sega Master System. Tiertex was the developer. According to Sonic Retro’s Wiki on the subject, no official license was given for the game.
Edusoft uses a sense of isometric 3D for some landscapes–beating Sonic 3D Blast by 5 years. You can see in the screenshot here at the landscape is reminiscent of the Green Hill Zone. Various challenges include math problems, from addition and subtraction to multiplication and division. There are also some word games to enjoy.
The Sonic research community may have known about Edusoft’s existence for over a year and a half. In September of 2006 a Wikipedia entry popped up on it from a programmer claiming to have been involved with development. That entry was promptly wiped. It’s only now that a ROM is available.
In March 2007, the same programmer who presumably made the Wikipedia entry posted this information on the title at the SMS Power forums:
When I started there Sonic was all the rage. As I recall it, it had been released earlier the same year. I am not sure where the concept of it came from, it was either one of two people but Sega knew of the existence of the title there was no doubt about that. They were interested in the title but I can’t be sure what their motives were. It may have been related to the PICO machine that came out.
The title is likely to have been the third title using Sonic to have been in development, not the second as people have claimed. Why do I say this? I do not know this for certain but it is very likely that Sega were working on Sonic 2 almost as soon as finishing the first, given the property they had on their hands. Development of this title would have started after that. It is possibly also very interesting that this was the first Sonic title developed outside of the Sonic team and Japan. That speaks volumes about the relationship between Sega and US Gold and US Gold and Tiertex which was very strong.
The title is…an educational game aimed at five year olds. It is of absolutely no interest to anyone older than that in fact if you looked at it and didn’t understand the target audience you would quite rightly question it. It is simple. The isometric level is almost like a front-end and other than telling Sonic where you want him to run by pressing a direction he moves automatically. The mini-games were single button press affairs…really designed for kids. In fact, the game was focus tested at a primary school in Didsbury, Manchester. It was quite well recieved, but then again if I was five years old I’d probably enjoy playing with Sonic more than anything else.
Until the ROM came to Sonic Retro this morning, the information went widely discredited. You can have a look for yourself and experience some Sonic history that almost never was.
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